What is...
PHP is a widely-used Open Source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. What distinguishes PHP from something like client-side JavaScript is that the code is executed on the server. If you were to have a script similar to the above on your server, the client would receive the results of running that script, with no way of determining what the underlying code may be. The best things in using PHP are that it is extremely simple for a newcomer, but offers many advanced features for a professional programmer. You can jump in, in a short time, and start writing simple scripts in a few hours.