Chapter 3. Understanding PHP Basics

Learning a new language is not easy. You need to understand not only the syntax of the language, but also its grammatical rules, that is, when and why to use each element of the language. Luckily for you, some languages come from the same root. For example, Spanish and French are Romance languages, as they both evolved from spoken Latin; that means that these two languages share a lot of rules, and if you already know French, learning Spanish becomes much easier.

Programming languages are quite the same. If you already know another programming language, it will be very easy for you to go through this chapter. If this is your first time though, you will need to understand all those grammatical rules from scratch, and so, it might take some more time. But fear not! We are here to help you in this endeavor.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following:

• PHP files
• Variables, strings, arrays, and operators in PHP
• PHP in web applications
• Control structures in PHP
• Functions in PHP
• The PHP filesystem