Introduction to PHP- For beginners

What is PHP?

The term PHP (Created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 ) stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. Now, what it means? it’s a language which is used to handle data on the server. For instance, you want to create a website or a blog. So in order to do that, you have to hire a firm or a company who has a bunch of developers working on websites.

Every I.T (Information & Technology) firm basically has two types of developers in it,” front-end and back-end”. The front-end part(Client side-Visible to the client) is mainly done by a designer who has a thorough knowledge of HTML, CSS, javascript and some of the frameworks like bootstrap and jquery etc. The back-end part(Server side– invisible to the client) is done by a developer who has great skills in scripting languages such as PHP, C#, C++, and Python etc.

In order to learn more about the difference between scripting, programming and markup languages click here

Why was PHP created?

The answer is easy. Internet would not have been possible if back-end languages were not in existence. For example whenever a user searches for a particular service or a term on search engines like Google or Yahoo. They show the relevant websites regarding that service or whenever a user fills a form for job or admission. Website knows exactly what to do with that data or how to process it in order to return the appropriate result to the user.Introduction to PHP programming - For beginners Consider this example. Whenever we enter our sign up details (Account id and password) on any social media platform, like Facebook or Twitter. Then that data is stored on their server. Now the back-end developers of those websites manage that data and all your information to ensure safety, privacy and fast retrieval as well.

To learn more about PHP frameworks click here.

Features of PHP

As we all know that PHP is among the most popular scripting languages in the world. It also offers some of the greatest features as well. So here we are listing some of the key features.

  1. Simple – It’s fairly simple and easy to use as well. It is also the most preferred language in order to start with back-end development.
  2. Fast- It is quite fast as it’s an interpreted language. There is no need for any compilation. It’s also faster than other scripting languages such as asp and jsp.
  3. Platform independent- This language is platform independent. You can run PHP code on any platform (OS) regardless of any hardware changes.
  4. Open Source- It simply means that you need not to lose any penny in order to get access to PHP.
  5. Case Sensitive- At the time of variable declaration, PHP tends to be case sensitive. But the keywords like if, else, while, echo are not case sensitive.
  6. Real-time Monitoring and Error reporting- It allows users to perform real-time monitoring by creating the summary of recent accesses for the user. And in terms of error reporting, it has some pre-defined constants to generate error warnings in code.

Applications of PHP

  • Web pages- Till now you must be familiar with this feature. These days no webpage is possible without the use of Hypertext Preprocessor. Every webpage being developed nowadays needs to be fully customized according to various devices as well.
  • E-commerce apps- From ting to tong and ding to dong PHP is everywhere. By this, we mean that booking tickets for movies to Amazon, Flipkart related online shopping apps  PHP own’s a control. As it’s all about the customer’s crucial data. Companies like Amazon, Flipkart hire data scientists. So that they can convert customer data into business crucial information. To learn more about data science and stuff click here.
  • Image Processing and Graphic Design- Apart from managing data in text format. PHP is used to manipulate images and also perform some image processing by integrating various libraries like GD library. In this way, applications are allowed to rotate, crop and resize thumbnail pictures etc.
  • GUI based apps- Yes we can also create GUI based apps using PHP. Though it was mainly used as a scripting language tools like PHP-GTK 2, DevelStudio and ZZEE PHP GUI, allow scripting in this language, compiling it into .exe capable of running standalone.

Various Resources to learn PHP

Similar to any other language there are tons and tons of resources available to learn PHP as well. You can learn it offline by taking numerous classes in your city or you can just opt for an online course. The main advantage of online courses is that they offer free tutorials. This facilitates you to learn without paying anything. So here we are listing some of the best available online sources.

So this was all regarding PHP if you find this helpful let us know in the comment section below. Stay tuned for more.

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