Write your first PHP program…

Audience…

Audience of this article is any aspiring professional who is considering PHP programming as a career option.

Scope…

Scope of this article is limited to writing your first PHP program in XAMPP on Windows. I’m going to guide you to install and configure XAMPP on Windows and then write your first PHP script.

Topics…

–       Download, install and configure XAMPP on Windows

–       Write and run a PHP program / script

Steps…

Step 1 – Download, install and configure XAMPP on Windows

XAMPP is a free and open source software package that creates a development environment for PHP applications and it can be downloaded from Apache Friends website. You can download it from here, chose the version depending on your Windows version (32bit or 64bit). Windows related FAQs and documentation are available in the website. Additional information relating to XAMPP is also available on Stack Overflow forum.

After you have download the .exe file, simply run it by double clicking on the filename, install with default settings, no need to do any customization in the installation options. Once installed, go to C:\xampp and look for XAMPP control panel, double click on the control panel icon and select Apace and MySQL as a service and click on start, wait until you see a green ‘Running’ text next to each of the services.  Open any browser (FireFox or Chrome preferred) and type ‘localhost’ in the address bar, it’ll open the XAMPP welcome page if your XAMPP installation is correct, i.e., Apache and PHP are working fine, click on phpMyAdmin under Tools menu to check whether MySQL is working fine. Here is a WikiHow step-by-step video based tutorial to install XAMPP on Windows.

Go to next page for step 2.

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