What PHP is:
PHP is a scripting language that does not need to be compiled. Similar to C, Java, and Perl - but with a few of its own twists thrown in there. It is a very powerful language, that has made hundreds upon hundreds of people rich and wealthy. Facebook, for example, the largest social network website to ever exist, is made mostly of PHP (for the core functionality anyways). If you've ever wondered, "How does a site do that?", there's a good chance PHP is behind it. Like the director behind the camera, it only shows you what you want to see, and hides everything else.

What it stands for:
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

What the file extension is:
All PHP files are saved in... you guessed it! .php files. Optionally, you can save them in .php3 or .phtml (although those are pretty out dated)

What PHP allows you to do:
Everything. Shopping carts, profiles, file creation.. it can even make images!

Prerequisits for learning PHP:
Basic HTML - nothing too advanced. We'll keep the HTML down to a minimum, in order to focus on PHP more.
JavaScript (Not mandatory, but useful) - we probably won't use much, if any, JS in this class.