Why You Should Learn PHP? | A step by step Guide

Last updated on 15th Jul 2020, Blog, General

• 80% of the top 10 million websites use PHP. PHP is particularly popular for freelance work, since many small businesses or non-technical people would want to use WordPress, Wix, or other popular content management systems to set up their websites or shopping carts.
• PHP was designed for the web, and it does the job well. Facebook has made serious investments into PHP.

Here are the advantages and benefits of learning PHP:

1. Easy to Learn

• PHP is easy to learn, even if you have no more skills of programming. It is one of the essential benefits of learning PHP.
• Compared with other programming languages, PHP does not need one to spend a lot of time studying a manual. A complete web page will develop just a single PHP file.

2. Familiarity with Syntax

• PHP has a compelling and easily understandable syntax. So, it is very familiar, and programmers are really comfortable coding with it.
• If you have any programming knowledge in both C and Perl, then learning PHP will be very easy, as its syntax is very similar to these programming languages.

3. Free of Cost

• Since PHP is an open source web development language, it’s completely free of cost. PHP is available for free to every user, and the community of PHP developers gives excellent technical support.
• Therefore, all its components are free to use and distribute.

4. User-Friendly

• PHP is one of the best user-friendly programming languages in the industry. It also gives more flexibility than C, C++, and ASP and overall helps in improving traffic to the website.
• To develop complex, dynamic and user-friendly web applications, PHP is only the first preference for all web developers. So, this feature is one of the main benefits of learning PHP

5. Supports All of the Leading Databases

• Besides, PHP supports all of the leading databases, including MySQL, ODBC, SQLite and more. It is the main advantage of using PHP for web development.

6. Efficiency in Performance

• Depending on your coding ability, PHP can turn out to be an effective programming language to use.
• PHP is known to be versatile when writing code and also in making web applications. Furthermore, it is extremely reliable when you have to serve a few web pages. 

7. A Helpful PHP Community

• PHP has a large community of developers who regularly updates tutorials, documentation, online help, and FAQs. It is one of the significant benefits of learning PHP to learn from the communities.
• If you have any trouble when using PHP, it is the best place you can find all information about the PHP language. Apart from this, you will get tips and tricks from PHP pros through several websites and forums. Additionally, PHP has a great community and resources to learn PHP online.

8. Control

• While different programming languages require long scripts, PHP can do that same work in a few lines of code. It has the maximum control over the websites. Likewise, whenever you want to make changes, you can edit easily.

9. Platform Independent

• PHP runs on just about each platform available allowing it to operate across different operating systems. Whether it is Linux, UNIX, Mac OS, and Windows; it also supports all the major operating systems. It is one of the vital benefits of learning PHP to develop your skills in web development.

10. Supports All Major Web Servers

• Apart from the operating systems, it also supports all major web servers like Apache, Microsoft IIS, Netscape, personal web server, iPlanet server, etc. As the programming language works with many operating systems, it will deploy on different platforms.

11. Speedy

• PHP uses its own memory space, so the workload of the server and loading time will reduce automatically, which results into the faster processing speed.
• The processing speed is fast, and web applications like eCommerce, CRM, CMS, and Forums are also developed faster by it. It is the main importance of using PHP language in web development.

12. Secured

• PHP is one of the most secure ways of developing websites and dynamic web applications. PHP has multiple layers of security to prevent threats and malicious attacks. It is the major importance of using PHP to develop a hybrid web application.

13. Trusted

• PHP is being utilized for two decades now since its beginning in 1995. It is one of the major benefits of learning PHP. It is trusted by a large number of websites, and web developers and the list is expanding day to day.
• Besides, PHP has demonstrated its ability and versatility by developing and maintaining some of the most highly visited and popular sites.

Beginner Friendliness

Easy to Get Started With

• PHP was designed to make web development easier, and many beginners find it effortless to pick up and get started with. In fact, PHP code was so easy to pick up, many non-programmers end up being able to hack PHP code together without truly understanding the code.
• While good programmers will never copy and paste code they don’t understand, this speaks volumes about how easy it is to pick up PHP.

• The latest version of PHP (PHP7) has fixed a lot of inconsistencies and fatal errors as well. PHP has a wealth of learning resources, but you should make sure to avoid outdated tutorials.

Flexible

• PHP is a dynamically typed language. This means there are no hard rules on how to build features, and you’ll have more flexibility solving problems using different methods. Furthermore, PHP is also more forgiving of errors, so you’ll still be able to compile and run your program until you hit the problematic part.

Scalability

Not easy to Maintain

• PHP is a dynamically typed language, which means the same thing can easily mean something different depending on the context.
• As a PHP app grows larger and more complex, this may get difficult to maintain as errors will become difficult to track down and fix, so it will take experience and insight to know how to design your code or write unit tests to ease maintainability. However, you can learn how to design code better by working with an experienced PHP mentor.

Not Fast

• As a dynamically typed language, PHP is too flexible and the machine would need to do a lot of referencing to make sure what the definition of something is, and this slows PHP performance down.
• Nonetheless, PHP7 has made changes to improve PHP’s speed.

• What’s more, Facebook has made some serious investment into PHP and it is possible to improve your PHP app’s speed by compiling your code through Facebook’s HipHop Virtual Machine. It’s not going to be as fast as statically typed languages such as Java, for example, but it’s still a great improvement.

Community

• First of all, community size is important, because the larger a programming language community is, the more support you’d be likely to get.
• As you step into the programming world, you’ll soon understand how vital support is, as the developer community is all about giving and receiving help.
• Moreover, the larger a community, the more people will be building useful tools to ease the process of development in that particular language. As of now, there are over 600 notable programming languages world-wide.

• So, with that context in mind, let’s get into the details of the PHP community size.

3rd Largest StackOverflow Community

• StackOverflow is a programming Q&A site you will no doubt become intimate with as a coding beginner.

5th Largest Meetup Community

• At meetups, you can generally network and learn from fellow developers. Meetups often offer mentorship to those who want it as well.
• There are 1500+ PHP groups at Meetup.com, totaling over 541k members – in terms of programming languages, PHP has the 5th largest Meetup community.

5th Most Popular language at GitHub

• The more useful projects there are, the more likely someone has already built a function you need and built it well, which will greatly speed up your development process. There are over 500 PHP projects that have over 500 stars on GitHub.

Here are 6 reasons why learning PHP can be a rewarding decision for your career.

Market dominance

• While some may argue that the entry of players like Python, Ruby on Rails and Node.js has shaken the popularity of the programming language, 80% of the websites still run on PHP. Giants like Flickr, Wikipedia, Tumblr and Facebook have incorporated the PHP framework for running their website.
• PHP has been adopted for developing eCommerce sites, GUI applications, Facebook applications, project management tools, CMS sites and so much more. With varied applications and its dominance in the market, PHP holds a promising future.

Flexibility

• PHP isn’t bound by rules; it offers its developers the creative freedom to build absolutely anything.
• The user-friendliness and flexibility of the programming language have been its biggest advantage.
• This dialect isn’t guided by the tenets as this allows to the coders and designers an opportunity to extend the measurement. With no hard standards under your fingers, you can have the greater adaptability to take care of issues with the utilization of various problems.
• One included favorable position is that it is tolerant to blunders as you can assemble and run the program until there emerges a genuine issue.

Frameworks

• Also, when it comes to building project-specific applications, developers needn’t worry about building from scratch. PHP has a variety of frameworks that can be utilised to add specific functionalities.
• Laravel, Symfony and other mature frameworks have made it easier to build everything from a simple web application to complex, enterprise-level applications.

A large, reliable community

• Many learners fail to recognise the importance of a community. Stronger community support can be crucial in gathering inputs for building complex tools and simplifying the development process.
• When individuals become an expert, they can venture into new challenges with the confidence of the PHP community.
• This dialect assembles a solid network that adventures numerous new difficulties. Truly, with the working of the unpredictable apparatuses, the future procedure winds up rearranged.

Easy learning curve

• PHP is considered one of the easiest programming languages to learn. Beginners find it easy to get into the nitty-gritty of web development by learning PHP.

Better opportunities

• As a PHP developer, you can access multiple career opportunities. eCommerce platforms such as Magento and WooCommerce and the most popular CMS, WordPress, has been built in PHP.
• With such demand in both online stores and content management systems, students have many lucrative career opportunities to choose from.

Career Opportunities

Salary information from gooroo.io

• If you plan to work as a freelancer, PHP is likely a good skill to learn, since WordPress and other content management systems are popular with non-technical people. Overall, PHP is still widely used by the majority of the web, so there should still be a consistent demand for PHP developers.
• Many shopping cart tools have also been built with PHP, so it is a popular choice for online businesses as well.

Future

• PHP has fallen in popularity due to several issues with the language’s design as well as the rise of Ruby on Rails as well as Node.js frameworks, though PHP 7 was recently released to fix most of the problems it has been accused of (inconsistency, slowness, etc).
• Facebook has made a huge investment in PHP which will likely keep it relevant, so it would be interesting to see how all this works out for PHP’s adoption rate in the future. Laravel, a PHP framework, seems to be maintaining a healthy adoption rate.

TIOBE popularity rank: #6

• A programming language’s ability to stay relevant also depends on whether the language is getting new blood. Interest in learning PHP is still steady, and PHP is still the 6th most popular language according to the TIOBE index. Thus, PHP will still survive.

Conclusion:

• Hence, these are the benefits of using PHP in the web development. It is advisable for you to use it in your next web development services project.
• Therefore beginners should take up a proper training for learning PHP programming language to get a good head-start in their career. Interested aspirants can enroll our PHP training course that will assist you to become a successful PHP developer.