Sams Teach Yourself HTML, CSS & JavaScript Web Publishing in One Hour a Day

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654 LESSON 24: Taking Advantage of the Server

If you’re a Mac user, you also have the option of using MAMP, another free package

that combines Apache, PHP, and MySQL. You can download it from https://

http://www.mamp.info/en/.

If you like to tinker with your Mac, you have the option of using

the version of Apache and PHP that are included with OS X. But

this can be challenging. Using a prebuilt system is quicker.

TIP

After you’ve installed XAMPP (or MAMP), you just have to start the application to get

a web server up and running that you can use to develop your pages. To test your PHP

pages, you can put them in the htdocs directory inside the XAMPP install directory. For

example, if you want to test the hello.php page I talked about earlier, you could put it in

the htdocs directory. To view it, just go to http://localhost/hello.php.

If that doesn’t work, make sure that XAMPP has started the Apache server. If you’re

using MAMP, the steps are basically the same. Just put your pages in the htdocs folder,

as with XAMPP.

The PHP Language

When you think about the English language, you think about it in terms of parts of

speech. Nouns name things, verbs explain what things do, adjectives describe things, and

so on. Programming languages are similar. A programming language is made up of vari-

ous “parts of speech,” too. In this section, I explain the parts of speech that make up the

PHP language—comments, variables, conditional statements, and functions.

It might be helpful to think back to Lesson 19 as you read this lesson. PHP and

JavaScript share a common ancestry, and many of the basic language features are similar

between the two. If things such as the comment format, curly braces, and control state-

ments look similar from one to the other, it’s because they are.

Comments

Like HTML and JavaScript, PHP supports comments. PHP provides two comment styles:

one for single-line comments, and another for multiple comments. (If you’re familiar

with comments in the C or Java programming language, you’ll notice that PHP’s are the

same.) First, I'll cover single-line comments. To start a single-line comment, use // or #.

Everything that follows either on a line is treated as a comment. Here are som e examples:

// My function starts here.

$old_color = 'purple';