PHP Tutorial Series For Beginners: What Is PHP

This introductory tutorial gives you a complete understanding of what is PHP, its prominent features, and its drawbacks. Get to know its uses along with a list of some popular websites built using PHP:

In this very beginning tutorial, our main focus is to introduce the PHP language to our readers. You will learn what PHP is, common uses of this programming language, features, drawbacks, frequently asked questions, etc.

This PHP series consists of 32 tutorials (including this tutorial). Each tutorial will cover specific topics. This tutorial series is for beginners. It will help you learn PHP starting from fundamentals and then go on to advanced topics like file handling, sessions, object-oriented programming, etc.

Let us begin!

Introduction to PHP: A Step-By-Step Guide

For a better understanding of this tutorial series, you need to have a basic understanding of the following technologies:

1. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language): It is used to build the layout of web pages.
2. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): It is used to style web pages.
3. JavaScript: It is used for interactivity.
4. Database: It is used for collecting and organizing data.

Note: If you are not familiar with the above technologies, we strongly recommend you study those technologies first.

What is PHP

PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (initially called Personal Home Page). It is the most popular server-side scripting language for creating dynamic web pages. Usually, it is used for backend development. Rasmus Lerdorf is known as the father of PHP.

Common Uses

PHP is useful in several ways, as shown in the below list:

• It can create dynamic web pages.
• It can create, open, read, write, close, and delete files on the server.
• It can store, edit, and delete data in your database.
• It can encrypt data for secure transmission.
• It can control user accessibility
• It can use cookies to track website users.

The following list shows 15 popular websites (including web content management systems) that were built using PHP:

1. Facebook: A social networking website
2. Yahoo: A search engine
3. Wikipedia: A free online encyclopedia
4. MediaWiki: A wiki engine
5. Tumblr: A social networking website
6. Slack: A business communication platform
7. MailChimp: A marketing platform for small businesses
8. Etsy: A global online marketplace
9. Dailymotion: A video-sharing technology platform
10. Digg: An American news aggregator
11. WordPress: A content management system
12. Joomla: A content management system
13. Drupal: A web content management framework
14. Moodle: A learning management system
15. SilverStripe: A content management system

Features

The following list shows the main features:

• Free and open-source: Free to download, install, and use to build applications.
• Platform independent: It can run on many operating systems such as Windows, Linux, UNIX, and Mac OS X.
• An interpreted language: It is an interpreted language, and no compilation is required.
• Higher performance: It is faster than other scripting languages such as Active Server Pages (ASP) and Java Server Pages (JSP).
• Case sensitive: All keywords, classes, and functions (except user-defined functions) are case-sensitive.
• Loosely typed language: No need to declare the type of the variables.
• Supports object-oriented programming (OOP): All major OOP principles are supported.
• Flexible with other languages: It can be integrated with HTML, XML, JavaScript, etc.
• Flexible with databases: It supports a wide range of databases such as MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and PostgreSQL. Also, it is easy to establish a connection with the database.
• Supports many web servers: It supports Apache, Microsoft IIS, Netscape, etc.
• Error reporting at runtime: It can generate an error message or a warning at runtime. Examples: E_ERROR, E_WARNING, E_PARSE, E_NOTICE, E_CORE_ERROR, E_CORE_WARNING, E_COMPILE_ERROR, etc.
• Simple and easy to learn: It is considered one of the easy programming languages to learn. Also, many learning resources are available.

Further, PHP syntax is C-like. Those who are familiar with the C language can easily learn this language.

• Good community support (forums, social media groups, etc.) as it is one of the popular programming languages used by professionals all over the world.
• Availability of several frameworks such as Laravel, CodeIgniter, Symfony, Yii, Zend Framework, and more.
• Prevent writing extra code: Features of PHP frameworks help to avoid writing extra code lines.

Drawbacks

No programming language is perfect. Thus, this programming language also has some disadvantages or drawbacks. But, these disadvantages or drawbacks are minimal compared to its heavy load of advantages.

The following list shows some of the drawbacks of PHP:

• Security issues may arise due to their open-source nature: These applications are not very secure as the source code of the application can be easily available to the public. If a bug is present in the application, a malicious user may explore the weakness and attack the application.
• Not suitable for building large applications: Large applications built using PHP are difficult to maintain as it is not a very modular programming language.
• It is difficult to make modifications to the core behavior of applications.
• Need a lot of time and effort: To use PHP frameworks, you need to put a considerable amount of time and effort to learn the framework.
• Affect speed and performance: Using several framework features affects the speed and the performance of the application.

PHP vs HTML

Click here for an understanding of the Comparison between PHP and HTML.

PHP vs Java

The below table shows the comparison between PHP and Java:

Further reading =>> PHP Vs Python – A Comparison

Frequently Asked Questions

In this section, we will discuss some of the FAQs of the fundamentals of PHP. These questions will help you to prepare for your examinations and interviews confidently.

Conclusion

PHP is a server-side scripting language that is used to create dynamic web pages, mainly for the backend.

Many popular websites were developed using this language. It has a rich set of features. When compared with Java, PHP has advantages such as better speed of page loading, shorter code lengths, less development cost, etc.

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