Why PHP?
PHP is one of (if not) the most popular languages for the web, we can classify PHP as a “back-end scripting language”, and that’s because it runs in the background and it is invoked by HTML when needed, the famous CMS (Content Management System) and Blogging tool “Wordpress” uses PHP at its core, same for other Blogs websites like Drupal and Joomla are both built on PHP.
How PHP works?
When a web browser come across with a PHP script it instructs the web server (e.g. Apache) to send it to the PHP engine running in the background for the code to be interpreted and the written actions to be taken, that action could perfectly be accessing a Database.
PHP the invisible worker
I know this can be a little bit confusing at first sight, and, even though the PHP code is made of “plain text” and its human readably code, most of the time, PHP pages will operate unseen by the user to transmit information back and forth between the browser and database.
Try this, right-click the web page and select View Source, you will not see the PHP code and that’s because PHP code is executed in the web server, and what you see is the outcome of that execution, I mean You will see the results produced by the execution of the code, they will be shown in the web page.
Dynamic, Database-Driven Websites
Thanks to PHP, web pages are no longer static pages only showing text and media, they are now dynamic websites showing different things depending on the user interaction, through the use of a programming language (and its interpreter) like PHP we have now fully integrated databases into websites.
Where to go next
You can go over the following articles to get familiar with PHP while you build your dream website.