PHP is one of the most widely used web programming languages today. The vast majority of sites and web services on the Internet are written using PHP. According to some estimates, PHP is used by more than 80% of sites, including such services as facebook.com, vk.com, baidu.com, and others. And such popularity is not surprising. The simplicity of the language allows you to quickly and easily create websites and portals of varying complexity.
PHP was created in 1994 by Danish programmer Rasmus Lerdorf and was originally a set of scripts in another language, Perl. Later, this set of scripts was rewritten into a C interpreter. And since its inception, PHP (short for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor – PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) has provided a handy set of tools to simplify the creation of websites and web applications.
What benefits does PHP provide?
- All the most common operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux) have their own versions of PHP development packages, which means that you can create websites on any of these operating systems.
- PHP can work in conjunction with various web servers: Apache, Nginx, IIS
- Simplicity and ease of development. As a rule, already having a little experience in PHP programming, you can create simple websites.
- PHP is similar to C, so if you know C or one of the languages with a C-like syntax, it will be easier to master PHP
- PHP supports multiple database systems (MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle, Postgre, MongoDB, and more)
- The prevalence of hosting services and their cheapness. Since, as a rule, hosting companies host websites in PHP on Apache or Nginx web servers that run on one of the operating systems of the Linux family. Both web servers and Linux-based operating systems are free, which reduces the overall cost of using hosting
- Constant development. PHP continues to evolve, new versions are released that bring new features, adapting the programming language to new challenges. And, as a rule, it is not difficult to upgrade to a new version.
As of now 28 Oct 2022, the current stable version of PHP is PHP 8.1.12.
And now let’s install all the necessary tools that will be required for programming in PHP.