Summary

In this chapter, we learned what PHP is and where it stands in the market today. We also explored PHP's built-in templating engine and the interactive shell. The templating engine allows us to mix PHP and HTML in the same file. Then, using Terminal, we learned that we can run a PHP script using its built-in web server, which allows the output of a script to be viewed in a browser by going to the server's IP address (localhost in this case) and filename.

We learned how to create and assign variables – by value and by reference. We also saw how to use PHP's predefined variables and how they are used.

Finally, we learned how to run PHP's built-in web server and use query strings in our code. Appending data to the query string allowed us to pass extra data to the PHP script, where it could be displayed or modified by the script.

In the next chapter, we will take a look at different types used in PHP programming.