"There is nothing more frustrating than trying to solve a problem with a set of ill-fitting tools. In fact, sometimes the best solution is just to design a better tool. This was the situation back in 1994 when PHP was born. Originally, PHP was little more than a library of C code built to ease the tedium of writing hundreds of CGI programs. A simple parser would scan through an HTML file looking for specific tags and replace those tags with the output of a function called in the C library."

"The best way to learn PHP is to try using it. There are dozens of books available, and the online documentation is available in 12 languages. There are also a number of very active mailing lists to help out beginners and advanced users alike. The Resources sidebar contains a list of the essential sites."

Complete Story

Related Stories:
ZDNet: PHP and Zend(May 11, 2001)
Introduction to PHP (ApacheCon)(May 03, 2001)
IBM developerWorks: PHP, Perl, Java servlets -- Which one's right for you? (Apr 29, 2001)
PHP Builder: Debugging PHP(Apr 17, 2001)