You may know PHP as the primary language behind your favorite content management system (CMS). WordPress, Drupal, and others communicate with a MySQL database to make managing content easy.
If you are a web developer, you may already encounter your fair share of PHP in templates. Perhaps you’ve kicked the language around a little, but you really want to know what’s going on.
Books can provide in-depth knowledge that learning on the job is unlikely to provide.
PHP is also unique for its surprising origin story.
PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf around 1995. Much like JavaScript, the scope of PHP started small. It was a few Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs written in C to help create dynamic HTML pages.
But then PHP exploded and became way more than originally intended. Now it is a general-purpose scripting language with support for object-oriented programming.
In 2015, PHP saw a massive update to PHP 7, which introduced the execution engine, Zend Engine 3.0, and therefore a huge performance upgrade.
That’s why in the book recommendations, we’re going to be focusing on books that teach PHP 7 or later.
Is PHP a Hard Language to Learn?PHP is actually an easy language to grasp and is a good place to start before moving into more complex web languages like HTML, CSS, SQL, and JavaScript. PHP is even considered one of the easier programming languages to learn.
With so many resources currently available for beginners and a forgiving syntax, it is easy to pick up, depending on your experience with programming.
What Are the Basic Requirements for Learning PHP?Before learning PHP as a beginner, you should have at least a basic understanding of HTML. Other than that, there really are no requirements since PHP is a standalone language.
However, it is definitely a must for server-side content creators.
You can then learn Python or any other language you want, but learning PHP will prove to be extremely beneficial.
What Is PHP Best For?The PHP language is considered a general-purpose programming language and is primarily used for developing dynamic web pages.
You will find PHP-based content management systems like Moodle and WordPress, making PHP a good choice for blogs, learning management systems, and eCommerce websites.