PHP for the World Wide Web (Visual QuickStart Guide)

Types of Variables

In this book, I will cover three broad categories of PHP variable types: numbers , strings, and arrays.

Technically speaking, PHP breaks numbers down into two types: "integers" and "floating-point" (or "double-precision floating-point" or "doubles"). But for our purposes we will refer to both of these as just "numbers." Due to the lax way PHP handles variables, it will not affect your programming to group the two categories of numbers into one all-inclusive membership.

PHP also makes use of a variable type referred to as "objects," but that is a far more complicated topic than we can discuss in an introductory book. To learn about objects and how to use them, see Appendix C, PHP Resources. Once you are more comfortable with PHP, you may find that learning about objects will greatly facilitate your coding, as object-oriented programming (OOP) is a powerful timesaver.