Hi. I am learning PHP and I want to know that what makes PHP unique than other server side technologies? Why PHP is becoming more and more popular? What are the reasons behind it? Please give your reviews. Thanks in advance.
PHP is relatively simple to learn, yet is extremely robust and versatile. It is also widely used and tutorials can literally be found by the thousands all across the internet. I would highly recommend learning PHP, but would also recommend learning other languages as well. But as a whole PHP more or less can take care of nearly all your web development needs
even just on DP, PHP Forum postcount: 27,657 Entire Programming forum: 47,224 (19,567 if you substract PHP) Plennnnnnnnnnnnnnnty of help and resources
PHP is open source. PHP is the most common used language on the internet. PHP has a huge community and uncountable developers using it. There are tons pre-written PHP script that can help you accomplish many things. You can find PHP web hosting cheaper than any other languages. All my sites are built on top of PHP. I cam from ColdFusion, ASP and ASP.NET and love PHP the most. Never look back .... PHP is the one!
The thing that makes PHP "better" than other languages is the simplicity of using hashes. It's also got a lot of ready to go functionality that other languages lack. Basic string manipulations can be done with simple functions rather than regexes. I also like its barebones object oriented ability. The reason it's popular is because it's free and easy to use. Most web-sites are not complex applications and so it suits most of them.
The points made by feyd and KalvinB are the best. PHP became popular because it was based on a C syntax. Since C is one of the oldest and most widely used programming languages around there were plenty of C programmers that took a liking to PHP in its early days. This is also why Javascript is more popular than VBscript. After the initial take up its open source nature allowed people to continue to develop it and add the many easy to use functions that it now has. At least thats what I think