Introduction to PHP and MySQL

So you know HTML and are now wanting to expand your horizons? You are wondering what else there could be ahead and are ready to attempt some more sophisticated programming languages. Maybe you have heard of a few, possibly C++, Flash, Java, or JavaScript? The answer is not a simple one, if you would like to start creating basic one player games you would likely look first at Java for console based or JavaScript for web based, but even with these you will come across barriers if at some point you want to add multiplayer connectivity or you want to allow the player to save their game progress. You would then likely have to start back from scratch in order to incorporate these changes.

Now, you may be concerned with the mere mention of multiplayer connectivity and may fear you are not ready for such a thing but it is actually much simpler than you think. The vast majority of web pages consist of different content that is dynamically generated. Dynamically meaning it comes from a database and/or it differs depending upon preset conditions. Now more likely than not if you have only worked with html you do not have any idea of what a database consists of, but it is nothing to fear and it is no way related to the command prompt/(cmd) or terminal at least not with how you will be using it in this tutorial. This is a common misconception and should be removed from your brain immediately in order to avoid intimidation.

So you now know that web pages in the same way as multiplayer games get their information from a database, and you are wondering what this has to do with programming. This is were PHP and MySQL come in. When it comes to server side programming PHP and MySQL are the peanut butter & jelly of the website world. MySQL is the language you will use when dealing with your database. It stands for “My Structured Query Language” and it is easily incorporated when programming in php.

PHP stands for “Hypertext Preprocessor”, which put simply means it is what directs html to act in a dynamic fashion. This can be a difficult concept to grasp but by the end of this tutorial you will understand how the majority of web pages are created in order to display different content depending upon conditions that you as a programmer set.

In order to proceed you will need to install XAMPP. In order to get help with installing XAMPP go to here and find an instillation tutorial that fits your operating system. To download XAMPP directly go to for Windows or for Mac or for Linux. Once you have XAMPP installed correctly on your system move on to the next section.