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→What exactly is PHP?
Having covered [[The History of PHP]] in the previous chapter it is now time to provide some detail as to what PHP actually is. In this chapter we will take a high level look at PHP and provide a basic understanding of what it is, what is does and how it does it.
== What exactly Exactly is PHP? == PHP is an intuitive, server side scripting language. Like any other scripting langauge it allows develpers to build logic into the creation of web page content and handle data returned from a web browser. PHP also contains a number of extensions that make it easy to interact with databases, extracting data to be displayed on a web page and storing information entered by a web site visitor back into the database. PHP consists of a scripting language and an interpreter. Like other scripting languages, PHP enables web developers to define the behavior and logic they need in a web page. These scripts are embedded into the HTML documents that are served by the web server. The interpreter takes the form of a module that integrates into the web server which converts the scripts into commands the computer then execute to achieve the results defined in the script by the web developer. == How Does PHP Work? ==
