Should You Learn PHP for Web Development in 2018?

In this video I answer the question, Should You Learn PHP in 2018? This question comes up often and I wanted to share my thoughts on using PHP.

Here’s my thoughts on Learning PHP

PHP, it’s a language that coders either love, or don't. There are those who feel it’s the absolute best, and others who look at it, as a relic of years past.

PHP is the Server Side language that’s used by the vast majority of websites. It’s used by Everyday blogs, Small Businesses and Fortune 500 Companies.

PHP has been around since 1994 ( released in 95 ) and has evolved over the years, making it the language chosen by over 83% of sites.

When you talk about a coding stack, php is often part of that stack. A coding stack consists of various languages such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP & MySQL. Web Servers often use a LAMP Stack which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP.

PHP makes HTML, Dynamic, and provides server side features that HTML alone, can’t do.

Your PHP code is never displayed to the person visiting a website since it’s processed on the server side. This means people can’t just right click and view source.

One of the main reasons php is so widely used is because it’s absolutely free. It’s installed on nearly all web servers, making it an easy choice.

It’s also one of the most well documented languages and there are more online tutorials for PHP, than any other server side language which makes it easy to learn, and find answers for.

So Why do some coders, dislike PHP so much?

Some feel it’s not a well designed language, some feel that it has too much legacy code and others feel it isn’t a focused language like some modern languages ( remember, it’s been around longer than most ).

Now the Million dollar question, Can you find work with PHP?

To answer this question, let’s take a look at who uses PHP. Some of the biggest names online use PHP and this list is just a short list of some of the companies and open source projects that use it in their stack.

Since PHP is used by small blogs and large corporate websites, it’s a great language to learn if you want to be a freelancer taking on smaller projects, or if you’re looking to work for a larger company.

PHP is also here to stay. The trends show that usage of PHP is going up and that trend isn’t expected to change any time soon.

I use PHP as my language of choice. Some might say well, you use PHP because of WordPress. I’m a WordPress Developer and I create Themes for people to use on their sites.

But I’ve been using PHP before I started using WordPress. I ended up using WordPress because every client I got, asked for it and since WordPress uses the same stack that I use, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP & MySQL, it was easy for me to transition

So Should You Learn PHP in 2018?
If you want to easily find freelance work or work for an agency, PHP is an easy choice.

Now, if I were to recommend another language to consider, it would probably be Python which is a General Purpose Coding Language that is also, time tested. There’s a large community of developers who’ve made python their main language. Schools teach it because it’s also easy to learn.

Node.js is another server side option and if you’re already familiar with JavaScript, then learning Node, is probably going to be a great choice.

Just remember, you have to determine what your long term goals are, where do you wanna work or what is your current team using.

But for Web Development, PHP is still the way to go.