PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. PHP files are parsed on the server before the HTML output is sent to the users browser. It can be integrated with databases and has lots of nice functions and gizmos. For example, all of LPAs content is on a database and I wrote a my own template system for the pages. There are other server-side languages like PHP. For example: Perl (.cgi), Active Server Pages (.asp), Cold Fusion (.cfm) and JavaServer Pages (.jsp) Don't get confused by thinking JavaScript is one of these type of languages because that's client-side. The difference is that JavaScript is run on the clients (your) machine unlike sever-side which is always run on the server before being sent to the client and that's why this page looks like a normal HTML page when you look at the source code. I wrote the LPA image gallary script in Perl for no real reason besides it made a change from PHP. These languages praticaly can do all the same things but the code syntax is in its own programing style. PHP is nice because it can be embeded into HTML pages very easaly for example: Code: <html> <head> <title>Bonding With PHP</title> </head> <body> So who do you think you are, anyhow? <br> <? // set up some variables $fname = "James"; $lname = "Bond"; ?> <b><? echo "The name's $lname...$fname $lname!"; ?></b> </body> </html>