Introduction to PHP ,A light weight server side language

PHP, the acronym stands for Personal home page Or Hypertext preprocessor?Confusing!.In it’s yaung age it was Personal home page. But later the name had changed. PHP as it's known today is actually the successor to a product named PHP/FI. Created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf, the very first version of PHP was a simple set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries written in the C programming language. At first it was Originally used for tracking visits to his online resume, he named the suite of scripts "Personal Home Page Tools," more frequently referenced as "PHP Tools." Over time, more functionality was desired, and Rasmus rewrote PHP Tools, producing a much larger and richer implementation.This new model was capable of database interaction and more, providing a framework upon which users could develop simple dynamic web applications such as guestbooks. In June of 1995, Rasmus » released the source code for PHP Tools to the public, which allowed developers to use it as they saw fit. This also permitted - and encouraged - users to provide fixes for bugs in the code, and to generally improve upon it.
The central power of PHP is it’s free simple,light weight and faster than other server side programming languages. PHP is influenced by C,C++,Perl,Shell programming of LINUX and many more. Some killer application such as Facebook,funnonsms and lot of light weight website developed by PHP you may find in www.
Some version of PHP ,are
PHP3 in 1997
PHP4 in 1998
PHP5  in 2004 (With object oriented feature and fit for scalable application)
and new version is knocking at the door of programming languages.