PHP Training

A Short History of PHP

Originally designed as a high level scripting language for creating dynamic web pages, PHP is used primarily in server-side applications. PHP was developed in 1994 as a set of CGI binaries in C by Rasmus Lerdorf. Rasmus designed it to replace a set of Perl scripts used to display his homepage. PHP initially stood for "Personal Home Page Tools".

In 1997 two Israeli developers from the Israel Institute of Technology named Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans took over the PHP parser. They renamed the acronym to the recursive initialism "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor". In 1998 they released PHP 3. In 1999, Suraski and Gutmans rewrote the PHP core and created the Zend engine.

In 2000, the newly formed company called Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel continued development of PHP and released PHP 4 powered by the Zend Engine 1.0.

In 2004, PHP 5 was released using the Zend Engine II. They also introduced PHP Data Objects and many performance related enhancements.

PHP Today

Today, PHP is used for server-side scripting. Other server side languages include ASP.NET (from Microsoft), ColdFusion, JSP (from Sun Microsystems), Zope, mod perl and Ruby on Rails.

PHP 6 is currently in development. The plan is to address the shortcomings including support Native Unicode (and industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all writing systems for consistency) and to remove magic_quotes options (automatic escaping of quote symbols), register_globals options (URL arguments become global variables) and safe_mode options (attempt to solve shared-server security problem). There is also discussion to added namespace (a logical set of variable and function names).

PHP is used in conjunction with Linux, Apache and MySQL to create a framework that enables developers to create inexpensive, reliable, scalable and secure web pages. PHP can accessed most relational database management systems, runs on all popular internet browsers and runs on all popular operating systems.

How Much Does PHP Cost?

PHP is free, and comes standard with many operating systems.

The downloadable distribution is on the downloads page of the PHP main site.

Why Should You Learn PHP?

If you currently design web pages with HTML, you can increase your productivity using PHP. If you could use a relational database to store information, PHP and MySQL is a great solution. If your web pages require secure server-side processing, then PHP is perfect for you.

Most PHP training courses are 5 days long. Fastech Learning Center will enable you to be productive with PHP in just 3 days. If you already know PHP, you might appreciate our Advanced PHP training course instead. Our hands-on, instructor led, high tech industry tested training will give you the skills you need to build dynamic web pages in just a few days and for a reasonable cost. Your improved web pages will save money in the long run.

You can spend many non-productive days trying to learn the PHP language on your own. You will end up with many misconceptions and holes in your knowledge, resulting in inadequate code.

See Also

Check out our curriculums for detailed course suggestions depending on your background and interests.