So basically, these two topics are quite complex and indepth topics in themselves, but this article will give a very light introduction to what these two web technologies involve.

PHP is a 'serverside' language, which means that it is run on the computer that you are requesting the web page from. So if you visit a website such as amazon.com, you are requesting the website from a computer in America (hypothetical). This computer is known as the server. And on this server, runs a specific type of language known as PHP, to set up your webpage so it appears unique in content for the viewer.

PHP 'Preprocesses the Hypertext' (Hypertext aka HTML), before it is returned back the the viewer. So for example, if you were logged in on amazon.com, and you visited your user preferences page, the page would be returned with your login ID, somewhere on the page, with the web form of information that is personal to you. This page has been prepared using PHP!

Where did it get this information? A database! This is where MySQL comes into play. The PHP is able to talk to the database, via the MySQL language. With as little as your user id, PHP can request all types of information unique to your user account. This information is then presented back to the user on page request, in various ways in the form of HTML.

Together these languages combine to be an very easy, yet powerful way to create unqiue, dymanic web pages, extending the power of a simple HTML webpage.

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