PHP summary
The lessons in this section have taught you about PHP - a language used to develop interactive and dynamic content on the web that is often used together with the Apache web server and can also be used with Microsoft's IIS web server.
The lessons included information on what PHP is, how to use variables, how to use functions, how to work with strings, and more.
PHP is a dynamic and interactive server-side, object-oriented, open source language that can be used to get data from forms, read and write cookies, read from and write to files, detect the user's browser, communicate with databases, and more.
What's next?
The next step is to learn Java.
At this time, you should already know HTML and/or XHTML, as well as CSS, Javascript, VBScript, and PHP. Learning web development follows a logical progression - first you should learn how to build webpages (HTML/XHTML), then you should learn how to specify the appearance, layout, and overall design of webpages (CSS) then you can move on to building dynamic and interactive content for webpages (Javascript), then you should learn another language used for building dynamic and interactive content for webpages(VBScript), then you should move on to a more powerful and complex dynamic server side language (PHP). After this point, you can move onto software development - writing code that goes beyond web development.
Learning Java will help you become familiar with building software applications from simple programs that print some text on a command line to complicated graphical programs with images and sounds.
Java is a high level, object-oriented language that can be used for software development as well as for developing web applets (small programs that run in webpages). Java is also a platform independent language. This means that you can run the same Java programs on various operating systems without having to rewrite or recompile them, unlike other high level languages such as C and C++. Java is independent of specific hardware architecture and operating systems.
To begin learning Java, visit our Java section.
