PHP is a scripting language especially for web servers generating HTML pages. I use for a few of my webpages, particularly where data is being retrieved from a MySQL database.

For generating webpages it's cheap and cheerful. On all the web hosts I've used PHP has been available. The language is similar to a lot of other languages with some gotchas. For instance:

"Hello " + "World"

does not give "Hello World" but 0. The string concatenation operator is "." not "+". I fall over that every time.