Summary

PHP is open-source software. It is also open in the sense that it does not demand that you use a particular server, operating system, or database.

In this hour, you learned where to locate PHP and other open-source software that can help you host and serve Web sites. You learned how to compile PHP as an Apache module on Linux. If you download a PHP binary for another platform, your distribution contains step-by-step instructions. You learned some of the configure options that can change the features your binary supports. You also learned about php.ini and some of the directive it contains. Finally, you learned about sources of support. You should now be ready to come to grips with the language itself.

In the next hour, we will write and run our first script. You will encounter some of the special syntax you will need to use to distinguish HTML from PHP code.