There are thousands of tutorials on the web about PHP. They jump right into how to make a database connection, and teach you to build small applications with a hands on approach. This tutorial approach is more practical - I'll assume you're a new webmaster and you've never had much use with the assets required to use PHP. (a server with it installed or a local install etc...)

PHP is nothing more that Preprocessed scripting that gets embedded into your mark up (HTML). This means that the applications written in PHP are not like HTML, a scripting 'language' that does not have the ability to preprocess routines or scripts. In PHP, you essentially script little programs that run on the server side, and the output is normally presented to your end users. PHP is widely accepted as the defacto standard for creating interactive websites that use databases.

In learning what PHP is not, you'll be able to get a better grasp on what you can do with it. PHP is not :

- A full blown programming language. It is scripting.
- Restricted to just web usage. It can be used on just about any computer, and many different OS platforms.
- Just for *nix systems. There are Windows and Mac ports.
- For use with MySQL exclusively. You can write to text files, use other relational databases and much more.

PHP is widely used because it is free, and very powerful when used in conjunction with database platforms like MySQL. (Also free ;-) That's probably why many of you have come to this tutorial - you have seen on many sites what a great combination PHP and MySQL can be. And I promise, soon we'll be jumping into how to do just that. But lets learn something on a smaller scale first, as it will help reinforce early on that PHP was not created just for MySQL.