The PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.

The initial version PHP was written by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995 and known as PHP/FI i.e Personal Home Page / Forms Interpreter.

Over the period of 15 years PHP evolved into major and great language for web development, latest 5.0+ version supports object model.

Today it is preferred language for data-driven web application, its popularity grown to such an extent that today it is hosted over 30 million web site which accounts for over 20% of the domains on the Internet

For the complete history visit php history

As free lancer and php consultant you can earn much more thru online portal development works available from oDesk, getAFreelancer etc

Some of the best feature of PHP are

• Performance – Compare to other language in same web development category like JSP, ASP etc, PHP is the fastest and highly optimized web development language (Actually it is interprester)
• Open source & Support – entirely developed by open source community, freely available and millions of developers community to help
• Portability – Today php interpreter available almost all OS and platform which includes Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac etc
• Easy to learn and master
• Supports various third party application

Few of the most popular web applications which are completeley written in php are

1. WordPress (http://www.wordpress.org/)
2. phpBB (http://www.phpbb.com/)
3. phpMyAdmin (http://www.phpmyadmin.net/) and many more

Continue with next lesson setup php development environment