Basic PHP Tutorial 1: Intro to PHP

hello and welcome to my basic PHP tutorials so what is PHP uh PHP originally stood for personal homepage and later it was kind of uh appended uh to the end of it hypertex processor so really PHP nowadays stands for a PHP hypertex processor um or phph HP but uh I guess they just didn't like the sound of that so anyway uh what's PHP used for PHP is really just a general purpose programming language though it's most notably used for web development um and really what it does is it's more of a server side scripting language and it's interpreted by C basically or or the server and so this means like whenever someone views your PHP page over the internet and they say go to like view Source um they're not seeing your PHP code they're just seeing the HTML output from your PHP code so um that's basically how it works and what its uses are and with that that kind of leads into the next part most PHP tutorials uh start off with the installation of xamp and Apache I don't really think that that makes very much sense if you're here to learn PHP to like maybe just run stuff on your computer then you've probably chosen the wrong language maybe check out python um or C or Java right but not PHP um now if you're going to run maybe your own like an unmanaged VPS or your own server you'll need to know how to install Apache and all that but chances are if you're watching a beginner's PHP tutorial that's not what you want to do so I'm going to assume that you have some sort of ability to host um files if you don't there are plenty of online hosting uh services that are free and then there's also plenty of online hosting that's really really cheap like most of the time I see on like GoDaddy you can buy a domain and internet hosting for like a dollar for a month so for and and really if you're if you're learning PHP I'm assuming that you eventually want to have a website so or at least understand the websites so the best way to do this is not you know to learn it on you know uh xamp and then once you get comfortable with doing xamp you're going to have to learn how to use okay get used to and comfortable with using some sort of FTP Service and then also um whatever your hosting is and if you've got like databases and you want to learn how to do stuff like you know interact with your database U manually and all this kind of stuff you've got to almost like you it's like a fundamental thing right how you edit a how you edit files and like test them and stuff like that like it's pretty fundamental um so if you learn on xamp and then you need to go go to like an actual website it just seems kind of silly to me to learn on there when the end goal is to be online so enough of that I'm going to be showing you guys I'm going to edit with um notepad++ you can edit strictly with just a notepad file if you want just um make the file extension. BHP but I highly suggest notepad++ um as its file name suggests it's an it's a an improvement over a regular notepad um and then also I'll be using file to upload the files I'll not really be showing you too much within filezilla but that's what I'll be using to upload files to my server um so anyway um but if you want you can use xamp you can do whatever the heck you want to do I'm just going to be going through the PHP Basics uh file if you do do the file Zilla rout that's what I suggest um you really just need to know once you download filezilla you'll need your host IP address you'll need your you know FTP username name the password and you can leave port empty and you just hit quick connect and that'll connect you to the root of uh your hosting plan basically or all your host files from there you can go into whatever directory you want to use um so and almost all of my tutorials will be single pages so you won't really need to even do that um it doesn't really matter where you're going to store them um you just should put them up there so you can test them yourself so with that I'm going to go ahead and hop right on into it and we ought to make at least a some sort of code on the first tutorial or I find it to be very depressing so what we will do is you start off a uh PHP script with uh PHP tags and those tags are question mark PHP and then you close off the tag with another question mark and everything in here is read as a PHP script and if it is not uh compliant with the proper syntax you'll get an error so uh let's do the first thing and the easiest thing let's just Echo out a statement and do not worry I'm not going to Echo hello world if you've ever learned any sort of programming language in your life you probably sick and tired of seeing hello world so instead we'll just Echo welcome to PHP and um if you're coming from python uh you'll probably for get the semicolons a lot I will forget semicolons a lot I prefer python that's what I do most of my programming in so I like to forget semicolons but um otherwise you know it's a string you got to close off the string simple stuff really so whenever you're done with it if you're using filezilla save it and then filezilla will say oh you changed a file and then you'll upload the file and then you'll come over to uh wherever your link is my link happens to be um my one of my websites H Kinsley decom I've got tutorial and then PHP tutorials. PHP and then this one just says welcome to PHP so it just spits it out on uh Ono our page so that's going to conclude the first tutorial if you haven't installed filezilla please do install filezilla if you don't understand what's going on with filezilla or notepad++ feel free to leave a comment I'll respond to it but really both of them are are pretty simple pretty easy to use um like I said with filezilla just just once you have a hosting plan in a domain um and you add that domain to your hosting plan you'll have you know some sort of IP address uh that responds to your domain you'll just connect to that you'll use your username password you'll enter that and then on um you should see kind of in the uh on the right hand side a big list of files or just one if you only have one user or a domain click on there and you can just make a directory or whatever you want to do and you can just easily click and drag files into there so you can make PHP tutorials. PHP click drag it into that folder and then you can actually visit that URL online the only thing I will just say is if you are um just kind of toying around whenever you're done toying around it's unless you know for sure that whatever you've coded is is safe like if you've got some sort of uh submit functionality or some sort of connection to databases stuff like that and you're just kind of toying around the best thing for you to do is go ahead and remove that file from the server while you're not doing anything if you're not certain it's a secure um file because you can kind of represent some risks by leaving uh connections open if you don't know what you're doing so um anyway with that um stay tuned to the next tutorial