In this chapter, we introduced the PHP programming language and what it takes to get you up and running to use it in your web pages. That was exactly the focus of this chapter - not to give you an in-depth coverage of everything that the language can do, even in the context of web development. We did not address the object-oriented aspects of the language, nor did we cover website-specific things, such as cookies and sessions.

We immediately zoomed into what everyone would need in PHP. We ended the chapter with a discussion on how to exchange data between client and server and use files to store that data. The functions allow us to add structure to these files. There can be even more structure in a file if you use a format such as XML, which is very similar to HTML. There are cool PHP libraries to deal with those, such as SimpleXML, which we will discuss in Chapter 10, XML and JSON.

Ultimately, you want to go beyond the use of files to hold your data and use a true database. The most...