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If you would have told me four years ago that this little book would be so popular as to warrant a third edition, I would have laughed at you. But the style of this book, and its contents, has proven to be quite suitable for the beginning PHP programmer. The Fast & Easy Web Development style is a step-by-step, learn-by-example path to learning a new programming language—with pictures included! Unlike the verbose text-only chapters found in most programming books, the Fast & Easy Web Development style appeals to users who are new to PHP, and especially to programming in general.
This third edition takes into account feedback received from the first two editions, but holds true to the original content structure and path to learning. For example, the first three chapters are dedicated to getting Apache, MySQL, and PHP up and running on your Windows or Linux machine. You might be surprised at how simple it is, and how quickly you'll be up and running—which is good because you need all three technologies to be working in order to continue with the lessons.
In this edition, some chapters have been added to provide additional projects for practicing your new skills, and also to account for new elements present in version 5 of PHP. After completing this book, you will have a strong foundation in the basics of web-based technologies and application design, and will be prepared to learn more advanced topics and programming methodologies. However, before jumping into all that, take a moment to familiarize yourself with PHP and why it is such a wonderful language to learn and use.
Its official name is PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, and it is a server-side scripting language. When your web browser accesses a URL, it is making a request to a web server. When you request a PHP page, something like http://www.yourcompany. com/home.php, the web server wakes up the PHP parsing engine and says, "Hey! You've got to do something before I send a result back to this person's web browser." Then, the PHP parsing engine runs through the PHP code found in home.php, and returns the resulting output. This output is passed back to the web server as part of the HTML code in the document, which in turn is passed on to your browser, which displays it to you.
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