ptg16476052LESSON 24
24 Taking Advantage of the Server
the Server
At this point, you’ve learned how to publish websites using Hypertext
Markup Language (HTML). This lesson takes things a step further and
explains how to build dynamic websites using scripts on the server. Most
websites utilize some kind of server-side processing. Search engines
take the user’s request and search an index of web pages on the server.
Online stores use server-side processing to look up items in the inventory,
keep track of the user’s shopping cart, and handle the checkout process.
Newspaper websites keep articles in a database and use server-side pro-
cessing to generate the article pages. This lesson introduces server-side
programming using the PHP language. PHP is the most common script-
ing platform provided by web hosts, can be easily installed on your own
computer, and is completely free. It’s also easy to get started with. Even
if you wind up developing your applications using some other scripting
language, you can apply the principles you’ll learn in this lesson to those
languages.
In this lesson, you’ll learn the following:
n How PHP works
n How to set up a PHP development environment
n The basics of the PHP language
n How to process form input
n Using PHP includes