What is this course about?
PHP, which stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, is a powerful scripting language conceived of helping developers easily create the backend of a web application.
It is a server-side language that powers over 75% of websites out there whose backend programming language is known, according to this report on W3Techs.
PHP is a high-level interpreted language that is much like the C programming language in terms of syntax and semantics. A person familiar with C, or any C-style language will have no problem in understanding PHP. However, even without any prior knowledge of programming, PHP is a very good choice as the very first programming language for any beginnger, although a knowledge of HTML and JavaScript really helps in the longer run.
PHP has a large scope for jobs. There are many frameworks built around PHP to ease web development such as Symfony, Laravel, CodeIgniter. This is evident of the fact that knowing PHP improves your portfolio and increases your chances of landing at a good job. Some big names out there use PHP to power their web applications. To name a few, we have Facebook, Wordpress, MediaWiki and Drupal.
The best part about PHP is that it is extremely simple to learn, yet extremely powerful and robust. We can do anything in PHP that we can do in any other sophisticated language. You name it — file handling, image processing, PDF processing, multithreading — everything can be done in PHP.
Benefits of learning
So what does PHP have to offer to you?
- Learning PHP enables you to create complex web applications with a robust backend. Where HTML, CSS and JavaScript allows one to create a frontend, to create a backend one needs to use a server-side language and PHP is a good option.
- PHP is simple, hence learning it won't be a strenuous activity taking a long time. And the best part is that once you learn PHP, learning any other language such as C, C++ would be extremely easy. One language really helps in learning another as many concepts are common amongst different languages.
- PHP is an object-oriented language, hence by learning PHP, you'll learn one of the most useful and powerful programming paradigms out there. Object-oriented software is becoming more and more prevalent across a multitude of platforms owing to its beautiful idea of abstraction and encapsulation, and hence knowing how to work with it will surely take you very far in the world of software development.
Why should I take this course?
When there are so many PHP courses out there why shall I consider this course? Here's why:
- Firstly, we work around a very simple and effective course layout. This makes sure that you learn PHP in the easiest way possible and at the same time learn in a chronological order starting with the basics, then moving on to the intermediate stuff, and finally ending with advanced ideas.
- Secondly, we don't jump off straight into web development. Many many courses out there teach PHP together with a server set up to deliver PHP pages to a web browser. This, we feel, eradicates the immense power locked in PHP as a CLI tool. We can create extremely complex CLI applications in PHP, but because courses usually don't touch upon this side, newbie learners never get to explore it. Instead, we start with exploring PHP completely in the terminal in order to make you much more confident with the terminal and the language PHP itself.
Prerequisites
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HTML
Routinely in this course, we'll construct HTML markup to create various kinds of applications. Prior knowledge of HTML is thus a clear-cut requirement.
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CSS
Although CSS isn't directly associated with PHP, we'll also routinely use it to style our HTML markup.
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JavaScript
Although JavaScript isn't directly associated with PHP, we'll use it sometimes to interface with the server side asynchronously.
