In the previous chapter, we discussed PHP as a language for server-side programming. Its main use is to generate HTML dynamically to create web pages that are delivered to the client by the web server, as well as to store, retrieve, and manipulate data on the server. We have used files as the containers for that data, but we have given more than one hint that as soon as the amount of data becomes large and/or complex, we want to use a database instead.

In this final chapter of the first part of the book, we introduce MySQL, a database of choice for many who do web development. You may have heard of the LAMP stack. This is the M in LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP).

Before diving into MySQL itself, and the way to interface with it in PHP (hence the title of this chapter), we would like to give you a casual introduction to databases in general.