Web development can often be an utterly perplexing affair. Today, aimed at beginners, I'd like to introduce you to twenty six concepts or technologies, each mapping to a letter of the alphabet. Sounds wonky? It probably is!

Technologies in their list include:

• Ajax
• Firebug
• Keyword Optimization
• Node.js
• Source Control
• WordPress

For each letter they've also included a few links to some related reading on the subject.

Last time we looked at text and strings in variables, in this episode we're going to continue with our exploration of PHP variables and delve deeper into math and number handling in PHP. Using numbers is not much different to using text and strings, you allocate variables and fill them in, using exactly the same techniques as you do using strings & text.

They covers some of the basic operators (+,-,*,etc), evaluation with equals, number shifting, binary and creating a "barrel shifter" to work with the binary bits of a number.

To many beginners the subject of variables is usually pretty scary, and often a reasonably difficult concept to grasp, the reason for this however is usually because most modern languages require some kind of indication as to what type of data a variable will hold, this in turn often confuses beginners because they don't know what type of data relates to what kind of type.

They describe variables (using sample assignments like strings and numbers) and talk some about scope and how it affects their visibility. There's also a brief mention of the superglobals there close to the end.

Welcome to part 3 of my 10 part series on PHP. In the first two parts I introduced you to the language and to what software you needed to run it. In this episode we will look at some simple PHP syntax, and we'll write a couple of small scripts to get our feet wet, and get a feel for the language.

Their first script mixes HTML and PHP together to make a "Hello World" web page. They also give the example of a phpinfo function call to get the settings for the current PHP installation.

PHP runs on all the major computing platforms available today, this includes all versions of windows, all the major linux distro's and a lot of specialist systems for devices like the Cobalt Raq and a lot of embedded devices. In this article however we will be concentrating on running PHP under the Apache and IIS web servers, which between the two covers approx 95% of the systems most people will have access to.

He uses packages on the linux installation to make things simple (for a basic Apache2 and PHP5) and the PHP and Apache binaries from each project on the Windows platform.

In this 10 part series, I'm going to take you through the basics of PHP and hopefully give you a taste of what such a versatile language can do. I am not, however, going to preach that PHP is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I'll let you decide that for yourself!

He introduces himself first, talking about some of his past experience with PHP and other various languages. He then goes on to talk about where PHP came from, a high-level look at how it works in both the web and command-line environments.