what is php? i always see it as a file tag when im around linux sites...whats the deal?

PHP is a scripting language. From the PHP site:
More info is available at http://www.php.net.

gee thanks...is this just like html?

You put PHP in your HTML, for example (hopefully this won't be parsed and returned!!) in the HTML in your .php file you would put

<?PHP
for ($x = 0; $x < 5; $x++) {
echo "Line $x <BR>";
}
?>

This would be parsed by the server then returned as

Line 0
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4

The nice thing about PHP over CGI scripting is that you don't need to spawn a child process to get your code executed, this can provide a big speed increase (assuming you're not using PHP in cgi mode, I've never seen anyone who is).

As per the previous post, have a look a the PHP site.

Cheers.

Jamie...