PHP

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.