PHP: What is it?

PHP , an acronym for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor, is a general-purpose programming language that is extensively used and free for usage. It is particularly well-suited for web development and can be integrated seamlessly with HTML. That's nice, but how does that apply? As an illustration: Example #1: A sample that serves as introduction \?php ~ echo "Hello, I'm a PHP script!"; ?> Embedded code in PHP pages does "something" (say, print "Hello, I'm a PHP script!"), as opposed to a bunch of commands to output HTML, as seen in C or Perl. Special start and end processing directives encapsulate the PHP code, allowing you to enter and exit "PHP mode." What sets PHP apart from client-side programming..