If you are reading this article it’s likely that you want to know more about PHP and maybe put some knowledge in practice later on.
First of all, what\’s PHP? PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor, even if at the very beginning that was the acronym for Personal Homepage. In few words PHP is a scripting language, but also a general-purpose programming language mainly used for the web development.
This is a language that has been around for a while, nearly 30 years by now and the raising up of some more recent languages makes someone thinking that PHP is in its phase of decline or it’s going to be soon.
Despite the success of other languages, there are signals saying that it’s not the case: since roughly around the 80% of the websites are developed in PHP. A big slice of this part belongs to several Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal which, as well as Facebook, are based on the PHP language.
Let’s see then why it worth learning to program in PHP and why not!
Pros of PHP
- Simple: PHP is not hard to learn compared with the majority of the other programming languages. Someone familiar with C programming should find themselves at ease programming in PHP.
- Open-Source: this makes PHP quite appealing than commercial languages and so are frameworks based on it.
- Cross-Platform: applications built in PHP can run on Windows, Mac and Linux and Unix OS in general.
- PHP has great online support and a huge community. This means that beginners will definitely get help or a piece of advice from more experienced developers.
- Beginners can definitely get help from more experienced developers, due to the great online support and huge community around PHP.
- Web compatible: meaning that PHP is highly compatible with the HTML language, so that PHP code can be included within the HTML code and vice-versa. This is a powerful property of PHP, as it\’s possible with variables and functions to interact with the structure of a website (HTML), but also with its style (CSS).
- Database friendly: it can connect to any database. You might notice though that it runs often along with the MySQL (or MariaDB) database.
- Its remarkable library support makes efficient working with data representation.
Cons of PHP
- Performance of online applications developed through PHP frameworks is less smooth than it would be by the use of the basic PHP language.
- Impossibility to change or modify the core behavior of online applications.
- It is believed by developers that bare PHP features a poor error handling efficiency. PHP lacks debugging tools, which are needed to look for errors and warnings. PHP delivers fewer debugging tools in comparison to other languages. Awareness of the tools PHP frameworks provide saves the day though.
- The poorness of debugging tools makes harder the error handling. This problem is anyway mitigate by the tools PHP frameworks provide.
- The simple PHP may be tough to manage, especially when dealing with older versions language.
- The fact that it\’s Open-Source, makes PHP prone to be analyzed by anyone to find PHP-based applications\’ weaknesses.
Conclusions
Learning a new programming language is always a challenge, especially for beginners. In my opinion the language(s) to choose should depend on the field the programmer wants to work on.
If you are just starting now with coding, I would suggest to try several languages until you find the \”right one\” for you in terms of simplicity and involvement: you want to have a pleasant time with it. When you feel you got passionate working on that language, then you can go deeper or even learn a new one.
Although PHP is fairly simple, if your goal is to develop web apps, there are easier programming languages you might want to try.
Personally due to its online presence and all the possibilities this language gives, I find that programming in PHP is a really valuable skill to have these days.
If you want to code not just for fun but also to build a career, then you may want to take in account to work on WordPress themes and plugins.
But also getting some expertise in popular PHP frameworks (like Laravel or Symfony) can significantly enhance your your chances of getting hired, since many businesses specifically look for developers to streamline development processes and increase efficiency with the use of these tools.
A good tip to find yourself in a stronger position in the job market, would be to learn the ins and outs of at least one PHP framework and make some freelance project based on it.
Ultimately, the choice to take about a language is personal and depends on various factor. But to anyone who is curious about the PHP language I would suggest to give it a try either for its simplicity and for the spectrum of projects and jobs they may work on.
