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Today, PHP is used by more than 33% of all Internet web sites world wide. It is a robust yet easy to use programming language for students to learn not only web programming, but also OOP (Object Oriented Programming) and other high-level concepts.
In an era of shrinking budgets, PHP has another great attribute. It's free to download and use!
PHP can be installed and run on pretty much any Windows desktop computer and comes pre-installed on many versions of Linux. An expensive copy of Windows Server is not required.
PHP Home Page
How do I install it on a computer? You can download it directly from the PHP.net web site and install it yourself, or ...
WampServer
Go to WampServer where you can download a preconfigured copy of PHP, the Apache web server, and the MySQL data base. Makes setup very easy.
This site may currently be offline. You can get information from their forums or download the files here.
A Simple PHP Tutorial
Getting started with PHP is easy. This site details a couple of example programs that could be used in an Introduction to Programming class or module.
W3Schools PHP Tutorial
W3Schools has a good introduction to PHP, as well as other web technologies like HTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and XML.
PHP For The Absolute Beginner
Another good starting point for learning PHP is this entertaining tutorial series written in part by Vikram Vaswani.
Sublime Text
Editing PHP files can be done with any text editing program, like Windows' built in NotePad editor or one of a number of free, open-source options.
Our webmaster uses Sublime Text, a sophisticated text editor with capabilities like editing very large files, displaying syntax errors in real time, and search whole projects quickly. Worth checking out if you spend a lot of time editing programs or text documents.
Sublime Text can be downloaded and used for free. They request that a license be purchased for continued use, but there is no enforced time limit for the evaluation.
List of Apache–MySQL–PHP packages
If you are looking for an alternative to WampServer or want to use a different operating system, this up-to-date list can guide you.
K12IRC.org runs on PHP. It's part of our WAMP server environment (Windows 2008 Server, Apache web server, MariaDB data base, and PHP).
PHP originally started out as PHP/FI, "Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter", back in 1995.
