This article is for InCTF’12.
Update: My team Eulerians made it to the finals! 
Howdy! This is a PHP and MySQL primer. It assumes that you have installed Apache, PHP and MySQL.
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages.
A simple hello world program in PHP:
echo "Hello World!";
Using PHP with MySQL
PHP is a great scripting language but for developing scalable projects you’ll need a database. In this case I am going to show you how to connect and use PHP with a MySQL database.
Connect to a database
mysql_connect("localhost", "username", "password") or die(mysql_error()); echo "Connection to MySQL successful!";
Selecting a database
Once we are connected to MySQL we need to connect with the database we are going to be working on.
mysql_select_db("databasename") or die(mysql_error()); echo "Connected to database!"
Executing SQL queries
Okay great! We have connected to MySQL and we are connected to our database! Now what? Well now you can execute SQL queries to interact with the database.
For execution of a SQL query on the active database PHP provides a function
mysql_query();
The function accepts an SQL statement as its parameter
For example here is a code that executes SQL code for creating a table
mysql_query(" CREATE TABLE test( id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, name VARCHAR(45), PRIMARY KEY(id) )");
Well so thats a wrap!
