Welcome! We're about to embark on an exciting journey into the world of PHP programming. In this course, you'll build a strong foundation using PHP, a popular scripting language used mainly for web development. As this is the first lesson in our course, we will begin with one of the simplest yet most crucial tasks in any programming language — printing messages to the screen.

In this lesson, you'll learn how to use PHP to display text on the screen using the echo statement. This command is essential for providing feedback to users, debugging your code, and understanding what your code is doing at any given moment. Here’s a sneak peek of what you'll be able to do by the end of this lesson:

php
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1<?php 
2echo "Welcome to the PHP Space Program\n"; 
3echo "Prepare for launch!";
4?>

Remember, in PHP you need to enclose your scripts within special tags <?php ... ?>. This is important because PHP allows you to mix other types of code, like HTML, within the same script. Using these tags ensures that the PHP code is correctly processed by the server, while any other types of code are rendered appropriately.

Printing messages to the screen is the first step in interacting with your PHP code. It serves as the foundation for more complex tasks such as getting user input, displaying web pages, and providing information to users. By mastering the use of echo, you'll gain a crucial skill that will help you debug and communicate through your code, making your future programming endeavors much easier and more effective.

Isn’t this exciting? Let's move on to the practical section and get some hands-on experience!