This chapter should have served as a grounding in the terminology and some of the idiosyncrasies of PHP. First, we looked at how PHP programs are constructed without looking at any particular structures. We then looked at how you can create variables and constants in PHP and how PHP's weak type handling allows you great flexibility at a price. We looked at the different type conversions and type casts that PHP permits. After skirting through the different types we considered how PHP creates variables automatically to handle form data, and access system information.