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"