Is PHP still worth learning currently?

piggeh

I have some books at home and learnt it briefly previously - is it still as relevant today as it was a few years ago, or have other web languages started to gain more of a preference? Also hosting wise php was always quite cheap (much more so than ASP for example) - if there are other languages around, are they as cheap hosting wise?

Just need to learn some self discipline this time meh!

trcooke

Absolutely yes. PHP is still relevant today and is very widely used. I am a web developer and use PHP as my first choice language. One of my current projects dictates that I use JSP but to be honest I don't like it as much.

As for hosting, you'll probably not find any other solution to be any cheaper than for PHP. This is because most PHP hosts will be running Linux (which is free) with an Apache web server (also free) configured for PHP. Compare this to something like ASP where you need a Microsoft Windows server with an IIS web server, both of which carry considerable licensing fees, you can see where the money saving is to be had.

You may hear of the acronym LAMP being talked about when it comes to web development. This stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP and represents one of the most popular ways to get a website up and running.

If you're really looking to get back into this then I'd really recommend brushing up on your XHTML and CSS too to get the best out of your site. You can really do some special things with CSS and would recommend the book "CSS: The Missing Manual".

Happy coding!

Cerro

Yeah PHP is still alive! I use ASP.NET as that is what all the companies I have worked for use, but from my experience most "freelance" web design people use php. And there probably are loads of companies which use php... so its well worth having.

John_0771

Yes, PHP is widely used and is very cheap to host - probably the cheapest dynamic web language. And is very powerful there are a lot of free hosts out there which provide a few MySQL databases with it. Or you can opt for paid hosting which is a lot more reliable and you probably get more.

trcooke

Going slightly off topic here but John_0771 made a good point about hosting. In my experience it does pay to pay for decent web hosting as reliability is, I believe, the most important factor when it comes to deciding on a good hosting company. Some of the cheaper companies often offer some sort of "up time" guarantee where if they don't meet a percentage target then they'll give you next month's hosting for free. This sounds all well and good but the fact still remains that your website has been down for 3 days. Or in my case, my customers sites have been down for 3 days. Not good at all.

If you're doing this just for fun then this is probably not as important to you but it's worth bearing in mind if you decide to do it more seriously.

RichPyke

I use PHP on a daily basis. Yes it is worth learning.

And good hosting is a more important issue, without reliable hosting you are nothing... while your website is down I'm taking all of your clients because my website is still there Regardless of uptime guarentees, what's kind of security is a month's hosting? 1 free month could mean 10, 15, 20 clients leaving! And FYI, my hosting packages I sell are from £3 a month, I'm not the cheapest... it says it all reall, free is worthless.

piggeh

Thanks for the responses (and apologies in the delay in replying - posted at work during lunch and got dragged away!)

Got Wamp server installed locally so will have to get going again on doing some scripts and getting used to the language - will try and do it in xhtml as well!