PHP

a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language. This may sound a little foreign to all you folks coming from a non-Unix background, but PHP doesn't cost anything. The PHP web site is at http://www.php.net/. Also see Shell.

PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language. This means PHP code can be inserted into HTML code of a web page. When the page is accessed, the PHP code is read or "parsed" by the server the page resides on. The output from the PHP functions on the page are typically returned as HTML code, which is read by the browser. Because the PHP code is transformed into HTML before the page is loaded, users can't view the PHP code on a page. This helps make PHP pages more secure for web developers. A lot of the syntax of PHP is borrowed from other languages such as C, Java and Perl. However, PHP also has a number of unique features and specific functions as well. The goal of the language is to allow web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly and easily. It is also a great scripting language to use for database-driven web sites. If you would like to learn more about PHP, the official site is PHP.net.