Learn PHP the Right Way

This playlist is a great overview.

I watched it myself and learned a thing or two despite also working with PHP professionally for years.

Highly recommend to also stop after each video and try to implement a quick example of what it is teaching.

Passively watching YouTube is probably not the right way to learn any progamming language.

PHP in 2024 is really nice. It's come a long way but is still very rock steady.

I like PHP, and guess what? I also like PowerShell for web apps. I don't really care what anybody says—I can build fast in PowerShell. My clients are happy, it's simple to debug, and I can tap into .NET classes when necessary. PowerShell + HTML + Alpine = productivity. I'm not building the next Netflix or Amazon and the end-user isn't going to notice or care that I haven't selected Node and React.

I just can't get behind the complexity of build steps and compiling, all just to get a website online. It's crazy. The simplicity that PowerShell (and PHP) bring to this process can't be overlooked... so I like to beat on this drum whenever I get the chance.

Choose the tool that is right for the job, and PHP can be that tool in a surprising number of cases.

It's disappointing that PHP still gets hate in 2024. PHP of 2024 isn't the PHP of 2004. As someone with a bunch of experience in Java, C, C++, Python, PHP, Hack, Javascript and a handful of others, PHP is (IMHO) almost a perfect language for serving HTTP requests because of these characteristics:

1. Essentially an HTML document is a valid PHP program. This is an excellent starting point for beginners;

2. PHP has a stateless API that means there's basically zero start up cost, unlike, say, loading libraries like you do in Java or even Python;

3. There's no threading within the context of a request. This is what you want 99.99% of the time. Hack extended this with cooperative async/await;

4. Because of (3) everything you allocate/use within a request context just gets thrown away. There's no persistent state (eg like Java's servlet model). Again, this is almost ideal;

5. Because of all the above, PHP hosting is incredibly cheap and accessible.

The two things I'd probably add to PHP come from Hack: a modern type system with nullable support and the collections (vec, map, set).

...why take a title that's already quite famous in the industry?

https://phptherightway.com/

Take me back to the LAMP stack days, good times

The only reason to learn PHP in 2024 is if you are specifically targeting PHP jobs. Learning PHP is like learning Perl: suboptimal.

Edit: Jesu X. Chris, I didn’t mean to start a language war. Learn PHP if you want, I won’t stop you lol