What does PHP do?

It’s easiest to understand with an example.

Humans have a site called Facebook. Maybe you’re a human yourself (I won’t hold it against you), and have a Facebook account.

And learning PHP can get a full-time/part-time job or an internship with a good pay check, you can manage your own website or help somebody in maintaining the website which in turn get you some money.

Why will learning PHP help you?

Let’s talk about how learning PHP can help you.

Understand how the Web really works

You won’t know how the Web works unless you know something about server-side processing. There’ll be a big gap in your knowledge. You won’t know how most of the Web pages you see every day are created.

Understand business value on the Web

Much of the business value of the Web depends on the server side. Want to sell products online? Your product data will be in a database. Web pages describing products will be generated by programs written in PHP (or some other language).

If you set up a Web shop, you probably won’t write your own PHP shopping cart. You’d use one somebody else has written. But if you understand how it all works, you can manage the software more effectively. Which brings us to…

Install and manage software

You have thousands of PHP applications to choose from. Many of the most popular Web applications in the world are written in PHP: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and many others.

If you learn a little PHP, you’ll find it easier to install and manage these applications. The documentation and forum discussions will make more sense to you.