Covers the latest major release of PHP, the most popular open source Web scripting language, in the friendly, easy-to-understand For Dummies style PHP is installed on nearly nine million servers, and usage has grown at the rate of 6.5 percent per month for the past two years PHP is easy to learn, well suited for Web development, and can be embedded with HTML, making it a good choice for creating dynamic Web pages for e-commerce sites and other Web applications; a database-friendly language, it connects easily to Sybase, MySQL, mSQL, Oracle, and other databases Explains how to acquire and install PHP, how PHP's features make it a useful scripting language, and how to use PHP for three of the most common applications: interactive Web sites, database storage, and common operating system tasks