Initially in 1994 a group of perl developers developed a set of scripts for their home page usage, and they named it PHP which was meaning that time Personal Home Page. But later the PHP word became stand for Hypertext preprocessor. This is a web scripting language and used to develop web applications online, PHP have become more and more powerful in last few years, This was not objected oriented before but now PHP supports OOP as well. The syntax structure is almost same as Programming language C So if you know C language already that is really plus for you. PHP is very easy language than comparing to other programming languages in market and easy to learn.
Benefits of PHP.
Well if you are looking for career in web development industry and you want to become a web developer or web application developer than PHP is best choice for you, Because this is widely used language, there are much help available online, in forums, php references, documentation and others. Also there are thousands of scripts in php already available and you can start using them. As php is free open Source language so the softwares written in PHp like some famous softwares, Joomla, WordPress, Magento, OpenCart, OsCommerce and many more are developed in PHP and they are famous you can use and customize them only when you know PHP yourself. PHP is very easy to use comparing to other web app development languages. There is a lot of help about PHP.
How to use PHP.
Well the key benefit of PHP is we can embed PHP inside our HTML that is really helpful so we dont need to return everything from long files and print. See below how we can embed PHP inside our html.
[php]
<html>
<head>
<?php
$title = ‘My web title’;
$heading = "My Web heading.";
?>
<title><?php echo $title; ?></title>
</head>
<body>
<h1><?php echo $heading; ?></h1>
</body>
</html>
[/php]
We are declaring or getting two variables in start of document, suppose we are getting them from database and setting their values for title and heading then we are printing them in title and heading. This is how we can use PHP in html and anywhere in our document.
As PHP becoming popular there are coming up few Frameworks for PHP as well codeIgniter, and CakePHP are famous frameworks for PHP they provide great help to develop fast and professional applications. You can read more about php here.