From the preface of the manual:

PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language. Much of its syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in. The goal of the language is to allow web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly.

A nice introduction to PHP by Stig Sæther Bakken can be found at http://www.zend.com/zend/art/intro.php on the Zend website. Also, much of the PHP Conference Material is freely available.

History

PHP was originally designed as a small set of Perl scripts, followed by a rewritten set of CGI binaries written in C by the Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 to display his résumé and to collect certain data, such as how much traffic his page was receiving. "Personal Home Page Tools" was publicly released on 8 June 1995 after Lerdorf combined it with his own Form Interpreter to create PHP/FI.

Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, two Israeli developers of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language's name to the recursive acronym "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor". The development team officially released PHP/FI 2 in November 1997 after months of beta testing. Public testing of PHP 3 began immediately and the official launch came in June 1998. Suraski and Gutmans then started a new rewrite of PHP's core, producing the Zend engine in 1999 (a page at www.zend.com states that PHP 3 was powered by Zend Engine 0.5). They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel which has since overseen the PHP advances.

In May 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released.

On July 13, 2004, PHP 5 was released, powered by Zend Engine II. PHP 5 includes new features such as PHP Data Objects (PDO) and more performance enhancements taking advantage of the new engine.