PHP has been at the helm of the web for many years. It’s an extremely popular, interpreted scripting language that is ideally suited for web development in part because it has an approachable syntax and supports different operating systems. This language powers millions of web sites on the net and is extremely well supported by its user community.
PHP is also used as a general-purpose programming language. PHP code can be executed with a command-line interface (CLI) and to implement standalone graphical applications. CLI PHP programs often automate common tasks such as testing, deployment, and application administration. The language offers a very complete set of object-oriented programming features as well as support for functional programming. The latest TIOBE Index (August 2019 at time of writing) ranks PHP in 8th place, behind Java, C, C++, C#, Python, Visual Basic .NET, and JavaScript.
The language is released under a non-copyleft free software license / open source license. The latest stable version adds lots of new features.
Here’s our recommended tutorials to learn PHP. If you’re looking for free PHP programming books, check here.
1. PHP Best Practices by Alex Cabal
PHP Best Practices is a short, practical guide for common and confusing PHP tasks.
2. PHP Security Guide by PHP Security Consortium
The PHP Security Guide is a project of the PHP Security Consortium.
3. PHP Tutorial for Beginners: Learn in 7 Days by Guru99
The course is geared to make you a PHP pro. Once you digest all basics, the course will help you create your very own Opinion Poll application.
4. Learn PHP by learn-php
The learn-php.org free interactive PHP tutorial.
5. PHP Tutorials by thenewboston
We don’t normally include videos in our programming tutorials recommendations. But this set of videos is high quality in content.
6. PHP5 Tutorial by php5-tutorial
While this tutorial assumes you’re using the Windows operating system, there’s still lots of useful coding information about PHP here.
7. PHP Tutorial by NuSphere
This free PHP tutorial introduces the major concepts and technologies involved with programming in PHP.
All tutorials in this series:
| Free Programming Tutorials | |
|---|---|
| Java | General-purpose, concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, high-level language |
| C | General-purpose, procedural, portable, high-level language |
| Python | General-purpose, structured, powerful language |
| C++ | General-purpose, portable, free-form, multi-paradigm language |
| C# | Combines the power and flexibility of C++ with the simplicity of Visual Basic |
| JavaScript | Interpreted, prototype-based, scripting language |
| PHP | PHP has been at the helm of the web for many years |
| Ruby | General purpose, scripting, structured, flexible, fully object-oriented language |
| Assembly | As close to writing machine code without writing in pure hexadecimal |
| Swift | Powerful and intuitive general-purpose programming language |
| Groovy | Powerful, optionally typed and dynamic language |
| Go | Compiled, statically typed programming language |
| Pascal | Imperative and procedural language designed in the late 1960s |
| Perl | High-level, general-purpose, interpreted, scripting, dynamic language |
| R | De facto standard among statisticians and data analysts |
| COBOL | Common Business-Oriented Language |
| Scala | Modern, object-functional, multi-paradigm, Java-based language |
| Fortran | The first high-level language, using the first compiler |
| Scratch | Visual programming language designed for 8-16 year-old children |
| Lua | Designed as an embeddable scripting language |
| Logo | Dialect of Lisp that features interactivity, modularity, extensibility |
| Rust | Ideal for systems, embedded, and other performance critical code |
| Lisp | Unique features - excellent to study programming constructs |
| Ada | ALGOL-like programming language, extended from Pascal and others |
| Haskell | Standardized, general-purpose, polymorphically, statically typed language |
| Scheme | General-purpose, functional, language descended from Lisp and Algol |
| Prolog | General purpose, declarative, logic programming language |
| Forth | Imperative stack-based programming language |
| Clojure | Dialect of the Lisp programming language |
| Julia | High-level, high-performance language for technical computing |
| SQL | Access and manipulate data held in a relational database management system |
| Erlang | General-purpose, concurrent, declarative, functional language |
| VimL | Powerful scripting language of the Vim editor |
| OCaml | General-purpose, powerful, high-level language |
| Awk | Versatile language designed for pattern scanning and processing |
| Racket | Platform for programming language design and implementation |
| BASIC | Family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages |
| CoffeeScript | A very succinct programming language that transcompiles into JavaScript |
| LaTeX | Professional document preparation system and document markup language |
| Elixir | Relatively new functional language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine |
| Dart | Client-optimized programming language for fast apps |
| ABAP | Advanced Business Application Programming |
| F# | General purpose, strongly typed, multi-paradigm language. Part of ML |
| Chapel | Parallel-programming language in development at Cray Inc. |
| Dylan | Multi-paradigm language, supports functional & object-oriented programming |
| D | General-purpose systems programming language with a C-like syntax |
| Solidity | Object-oriented, high-level language for implementing smart contracts |
| XML | Set of rules for defining semantic tags that describe the structure and meaning |
| Vala | Object-oriented language with a self-hosting compiler that generates C code |
| ECMAScript | Best known as the language embedded in web browsers |
| Kotlin | Statically typed, general-purpose programming language with type inference |
| TypeScript | Strict syntactical superset of JavaScript, adding optional static typing |
| Markdown | Plain text formatting syntax designed to be easy-to-read and easy-to-write |
| Pike | Interpreted, general-purpose, high-level, cross-platform, dynamic language |
| HTML | HyperText Markup Language |
| Factor | Dynamic stack-based language |
| Objective-C | General purpose language which is a superset of C |
| Standard ML | One of the two main dialects of the ML language |
| Alice | Educational language with an integrated development environment |
| Agda | Dependently typed functional language based on intuitionistic type theory |
| Icon | High-level, general-purpose language |
| PureScript | Small strongly, statically typed language with expressive types |
| Tcl | Dynamic language based on concepts of Lisp, C, and Unix shells |
| Eiffel | Object-oriented language |
| ClojureScript | Compiler for Clojure that targets JavaScript |
| QML | Hierarchical declarative language for user interface layout with a syntax to JSON |
| VHDL | Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language |
| OpenCL | Open Computing Language |
| Elm | Functional language that compiles to JavaScript |
| Haml | HTML Abstraction Markup Language |
| J | Array programming language based primarily on APL |
| LabVIEW | Designed to enable domain experts to build power systems quickly |
| Hack | For the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), created as a dialect of PHP |
| Imba | Full-stack language that compiles to performant JavaScript |
| V | Statically typed compiled language to build maintainable software |
| PostScript | Page description language in electronic and desktop publishing |
| Arduino | Inexpensive, flexible, open source microcontroller platform |
| Nim | Statically typed compiled systems language with syntax resembling Python |
| Emacs Lisp | A dialect of the Lisp programming language. |
| Octave | High-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations |
| Bash | ‘Bourne-Again-SHell’ is both a shell and programming language |
| Limbo | Designed for applications running distributed systems on small computers |
| CSS | CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) specifies a web page’s appearance |
| Raku | Member of the Perl family of programming languages |
| Coq | Dependently typed language similar to Agda, Idris, F*, Lean, and others |