PHP Newbie needs help!

Anon

I'm on my home PC, and want to learn PHP. I tried doing this in notepad, and viewed it in IE, but didn't get anything:

<head><title>my first php page</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php echo "hello world"; ?>
</body>

but that did nothing. Is it cuz I need to have it on a server?

Also, what does the download from php.net (php for windows) do for you? I mean, you don't need to have it to make php scripts, do you? Cuz I downloaded it and have no clue what to do w/it. I couldn't find any .exe file.

I REALLY appreciate the help!
Email me or leave a message here.
Thanx,
Rob
:o)

salmon

PHP is quite a bit different from HTML. With HTML, your browser does all the parsing and then displays the result. With PHP, the server parses the PHP, produces HTML (and HTTP headers, etc), and then sends that result to the browser to parse.

If you just try to open a PHP script in your browser, it will assume it's an HTML file (or text file, etc) and generate the output accordingly.

So to answer your question: yes, you need to have it on a server. However, you can install a webserver on your Windows machine and then install and configure PHP.