After a number of requests, in this series we’re going to back to basics and will look at PHP from a beginner’s point of view. If you’re looking to expand your knowledge of PHP, and want to move beyond what the default server behaviors etc that Dreamweaver MX offers, to create more advanced sites, then this is the series for you, so that you can get to grips with PHP and really understand what's happening when you begin to handcode and add more powerful features to your web pages.
First, were going to look at how PHP actually works, and how the PHP code is processed on the web server, and how the web server knows which sections of the page represent PHP code. We then move on to look at the order in which certain PHP operations should be placed on the page, so that they can be processed in a logical order.
In the second half of this tutorial we look at how to create simple output using PHP, and setup variables which can be used to hold values which change during the course of the script. We then look at a range of different operators which can be used to work with the values in variables, ready for the next part of this tutorial where we will be looking at conditional processing.
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