Chapter 3. Exploring PHP

With PHP, MySQL, and Apache installed, you're ready to begin writing code. Unlike many languages, PHP doesn't require complex tools such as compilers and debuggers. In fact, you'll soon see that you can enter PHP directly into your existing HTML documents, and with just a few tweaks, you'll be off and running.

In this chapter, we'll start by showing you how PHP handles simple text, and then move on to basic decision-making. Some really cool things you can do include showing an image based on the current user's browser, and printing a warning message if the user is browsing from an operating system that makes your web site look crummy. All this and more is possible with PHP, which makes these tricks simple.