PHP is a recursive acronym standing for Hypertext Preprocessor. Originally the acronym stood for Personal Home Page. PHP succeeds an older product, named PHP/FI. PHP/FI was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, initially as a simple set of Perl scripts for tracking accesses to his online resume. Rasmus chose to release the source code for PHP/FI for everybody to sees as open source, so that anybody can use it, as well as fix bugs in it and improve the code. From there his code was improved on and he was recuited help by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski in 1997, who helped him release versions 3.0 and 4.0 of PHP.

PHP has no requirements for the end user besides the core requirement of a web browser that they already have. PHP is different from many web-based languages like JavaScript, CCS (Cascading Style Sheets), XML (eXtended Markup Language) and Java in the fact that it does not need browsers that support these languages in order to use those languages within its web pages. PHP is a server side language meaning that the server does all of the processing of the PHP on the server before any HTML is sent to the browser. The PHP code itself is executed on the server and striped out of the PHP file before anything is sent to the browser. So all of what the browser see is just HTML. The same is true with this page if you would look at the source code.

PHP is found primary on the Apache web server ran on Linux, though there are versions of Apache and PHP for Windows, OS X(BSD), Unix, and Novell. PHP is the most popular add on extension for Apache. PHP has support for MySQL which is the world's most popular Open Source Database, designed for speed, power and precision in mission critical, heavy load use. MySQL is the most popular database to be integrated into PHP web applications to store information.

PHP has support also for LDAP (lightweight directory access protocol) which is an information model that is based on an entry, which contains information about some object (e.g., a person). LDAP is commonly used in web application for username and password login and for user credentials for web applications.

PHP does not cost anything because it is open source, anybody can write PHP applications and scripts. PHP is also very popular so there are many books on the subject . To learn how to use PHP you should have good understanding of HTML and C (is scientific programming language) style of programming. The primary resource to learn PHP would be their web site. The have tutorials < http://www.php.net/tut.php> to glide you through the beginning elements of programming for the language. This technology influences my life and others positively because it tries to extended technology such as of the web applications. I have benefited from this language by being able to write online registration for a 4-H camp, and as Trouble Ticket software.