Originally published on zero2php.dev — part of the Zero to PHP course. View this lesson on the original site.
Who created PHP?
PHP began in 1994 as a small set of CGI scripts written by Rasmus Lerdorf to track visitors to his online résumé. The name originally stood for Personal Home Page. Over time it grew into a full programming language; today PHP is officially the PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor recursive acronym—what matters for you is that it is a real, actively maintained language with a huge ecosystem.
The reference implementation and language definition you will use are developed in the open, with php.net as the home for documentation and downloads.
PHP is not “compiled” in the everyday sense
People often say PHP is not compiled because you usually do not turn your whole project into one standalone binary (the way you might with C, Rust, or Go), ship that artifact, and run it elsewhere. Instead you keep .php source files on disk, and the PHP runtime executes them when you run php script.php or when a web server hands a request to PHP.
What that means for you: your normal loop is edit → save → run again. You get quick feedback without a long compile step before you see output or errors. Modern PHP may compile to bytecode and cache it (e.g. OPcache) for speed, but your workflow still feels like working from source: change a line, run again, read what PHP prints.
What PHP is used for
PHP is widely used for web backends, REST-style APIs, CLI automation, and content systems (for example WordPress and Drupal). This course starts with small CLI scripts so you can see output and errors without extra moving parts; later lessons add HTTP, databases, and framework patterns.
How this course works
You will read short lessons, run examples locally, and check your understanding with a chapter quiz. Keep php.net open: it is the authoritative language reference for syntax and built-in functions.
After Chapter 1
By the end of Chapter 1, you should be able to install PHP, run a file, and work with variables, types, strings, numbers, constants, and operators with confidence.
From Zero to PHP — PHP foundations: environment, syntax, and values