Coding College

With tons of coding languages out there, it can be a rough road finding and choosing one! Well, I’m your guide for this marvelously marvelous journey! Have you ever even heard of PHP? If not, I fear you are sincerely missing out. PHP is a must know for you web developers; It’s what makes websites do what they do (Even showing this to you)! So hop on board and I will show you the seven wonders of PHP.

1. It’s Easy
PHP is known for it’s ease of learning and use. Plus there’s tons of tutorials out there; I suggest starting out with an introduction to PHP, then moving on to PHP basics. If you can’t find what your looking for on CodingCollege just leave a comment and we will find a good tutorial site for you. [We are currently working on our PHP tutorials, there seems to be some errors to work out.]

2. The Community
Having a huge community of people that know all about PHP is a great for various reasons. To start with, there are millions of tech-savvies dedicated to PHP to point you in the right direction. Secondly, forums and websites house thousands of sample code for you to use and learn off of. Lastly, if you ever just fell like hanging out on the forums you will find that generally PHP coders are a nice bunch unlike some desktop programmers I’ve crossed.

Communities to check out:

>PHP.net
>Talk PHP
>PHP Resource Index
>Dev Network Forums

3. Famousocity!?
Ever heard of sites like Facebook, Yahoo or Digg?
well, they are all coded with PHP. They use it because it can work with all their databases (which is how they keep hold of all their user information) and it allows them to interact with their reader/users instantly (with some help from AJAX). The reasons these sites are so popular is because it’s human nature to interact and PHP allows you to do that.

4. It’s On The House.
Yup, it’s free.. what more can I say? You can download the latest version of PHP for free from www.php.net anytime you want. This is one of the main reasons PHP became popular so quick and why is still growing at a rapid rate. If you don’t have a web server, or too lazy and broke to buy one, you can get WAMP (Windows)/LAMP (Linux). Your websites running with WAMP won’t be viewable to anyone but you, but Hey! It’s nice for learning. (WAMP is just a “next-click” installer that bundles Apache, PHP, MySQL, and PHPMyAdmin together. Simple Install!).

5. It’s Powerful
Everyone likes power and PHP brought it to the World Wide Web. With the recent release of version 5 it just got a whole lot more powerful (Now introducing… Objects!). PHP is open source which means you can really get down into the framework of it which gives it more flexibility. The other reasons it’s so powerful is because of it’s simplicity, speed, flexibility and friendly (the user browsing the web site doesn’t need to have anything installed on their computer!).

6. Database Resourcefulness
PHP uses all the popular database systems like MySQL, SQlite and Oracle. You can find a full list of them here. This is great because if you have learned a database system you most probably stay with that one and do not have to learn a new one.

7. Billions, Trillions, One-Millions!
The guy who started Ebay back in 1995 was a person by the name of Pierre Omidyar. As a test the first item he used it to sell was a broken laser pointer which ended up going for $14.83 Now the company is estimated to be worth over 45 billion dollars. If he could do it why can’t you? There is no answer to that question. Get in and start learning now before someone takes your idea and uses it to become rich and famous instead of you.

As always, we here at Coding College would love to hear from you. If you would like to congratulate, criticize, or even chuck a chunk of conglomerate at us, please take to do so below!