PHP Redirects are a great way to move a user from one page to the next automatically. Of course you could do this with a meta redirect, or a javascript redirect, but the advantage of a PHP Redirect is that it is transparent to the user. In other words, it happens immediately.
A PHP Redirect is pretty simple, but there is one important rule to remember. This is a header function, and absolutely nothing, including white space, can be printed to the browser before the code with the redirect executes.