You do not need to start from scratch. PHP is just code that makes HTML. (As laserlight said, it can pretty much make anything including images, video, sound, sms messages for your cell phone, etc. But let's start simple and use it to make HTML).
For example, do this: Make a file called test.php
Put this code in the file:
<?php
print "<html>";
print "<head>";
print "<title>Test Page</title>";
print "</head>";
print "<body>";
$x = 7;
$y = 8;
$z = $x + $y;
print "The <b>magic</b> number is $z";
print "</body>";
print "</html>";
?>
Save that file, upload it to your server and open it in a web browser. http://www.realviewresidential.com/test.php
Now do a view source. Notice that you don't see any print statement? You don't see any reference to $x or $y ?
What happened is that the web server ran the PHP code, did all the steps that you gave it, and finished with some flat HTML. And then it sent the HTML to your machine on your desk. Your local machine didn't run the PHP. Your local machine didn't calculate the sum of $x and $y. As far as your machine knows, this page is simply HTML with the number 15 in the body - it doesn't know that the 15 was calculated in a split second before the page was sent out over the Internet to your machine.
So... the beauty of PHP is that you can handle variables, data from forms, data from databases, and construct HTML pages for people to see. This way, for example, someone could connect to your web site and do a search on "New York City" and the PHP would look up the rentals available just in NYC and then build HTML to display just that list of rentals.
And there's another thing you can do. You can mix HTML and PHP inside one file.
For example, do this: Make a file called test2.php
Put this code in the file:
<html>
<head>
<title>This is test 2</title>
</head>
<body>
This is some text on the page<br>
Today's date is:
<?php
$date = date("n/j/Y g:i:s A",time());
print "$date";
?>
<br>
And there you have, PHP mixed into the middle of some HTML
</body>
</html>
Notice that it's a normal HTML page... except that there's a little PHP in the middle. That's an example of about two lines of code in the middle of some HTML. You could just as easily put 200 or even 2000 lines of code that do all sorts of complex stuff. And in this way, you can mix PHP code into the HTML pages that you have already built.
So that's the intro - PHP is just an HTML maker. Now that you understand what PHP does, I can promise you that it will take another 5 years to learn how to do all sorts of cool things that make your pages dynamic.
