Hello, ladies and gentlemen. I'm not sure if there's men joining. Uh first, thank you for participating in this session. Uh As you see, the title of this session is what's php and why you should learn it in 2020 first before starting.I'm just gonna take you through the uh what we're gonna talk about in this session. We will first start with an intro into web development. Then we will talk about PHP and PHP frameworks. What is php? What are the, the frameworks? Then we'll talk about the job opportunities and the market and at the end, we'll talk about how you can learn it and what are the resources. And if it takes a lot of time or not to learn php, before we start, I want to introduce you a little bit to myself. Uh My name is Lia J. I'm a software engineer and a product owner. I'm originally from Syria and I've been living in Brussels in Belgium for two years now. And uh I shared with you my linkedin in case you want to have um if you have any questions or any uh things to discuss as um we don't have um time for questions after this session.

So in the perfect case, uh we would uh have this event in a room live with everyone there. But sadly, because of this pandemic, we had to do this, we had to do this virtually and actually not just events have moved virtually everything. You know, now we're elearning, we have our services online, we do shopping. Uh We do, I don't know, food delivery, social media, everything moves online. So all our aspects are just on the internet and websites are growing by the hour and there's a lot of opportunity there. And we should take advantage of that either by creating the product or a service in the market or by learning how to develop and how to create the website. And actually not just for web development, coding and uh software development in general is really a good skill that you should have or you should learn, it can improve your way of thinking and it will open a lot of opportunities to you. So sometimes, but usually let's say we can start with the web coding or web development because it's a bit more easier than software development. So there's a lot of opportunities there and we should take advantages advantage of it before we go into uh bits of coding. I want to explain a little bit of an aspect, the difference between websites and web applications. Usually a website is just a page that can inform you or show you information like news website or a personal blog.

And in these websites, you don't interact with the u the user doesn't interact with the platform, you don't create an account or you don't send messages or you don't have any interaction while a web application, it's a bit more complicated. You have more services and features, something like um Facebook or Zalan do, for example, where you can create a user and you can go inside and do some shopping or anything like you're interacting and to go into this world of software development and uh web publication development, you have to waste either you learn uh to create websites using a tool which usually uh usually they're called C MS S, something like wordpress or uh Wix or Zuma.

So these are like tools that help you create a website. You can just drag and drop like create a banner a button or anything like that or you can go the hard way or the, the hard code, uh the hardcore way, which is coding. I'm not gonna say you're gonna start it from scratch the code or, or the website that you're creating, but it's more flexible and basically you can do whatever you want, you put the stuff wherever you want. So there's no template there and you just start creating your website.

But how I can start creating my website. What, what are the tools? How should I learn? What, what should I do as, you know, there's a lot of options out there for uh creating a website and the languages to use it. There's, you know, PHP, you hear a lot like PHP C++ C#, there's a variety of programming languages. And usually when you are creating a web application, you don't learn one programming languages, you usually learn more. You mainly work with one but you have, you know, to know like two or three, but you don't need to use it the whole time, but you need to know the concept. And once you know one actually you by default, know the others because you know the logic. So you see here, like we have a front end backend database. There's a variety of programming languages that you can use to create a web application here. I don't know if everyone is familiar with the concept, Front end and back end development. If we take a look at this uh mountain, it's really explains what's front end and what's backend. Front end is basically what you see on a website or a web page. And it's like takes like 20% of the total effort. It's like the colors, the button, how the website or the uh the web application interacts with you.

All this stuff is called front end and then you have the actual work and where the crazy things happen is the backend and it's like the 80% of the total effort and you usually don't see that. I'm gonna say it's something like a restaurant. For example, when you go to a restaurant, uh, you see the tables, the decoration and everything, that's the front end, but the meals they're cooked in the kitchen, in the back where you don't see them and this is where all the magic happens. And that's the back end and front end and back end are really linked to each other. One of the most famous or um an example of front end languages. Uh You have html javascript CS S no GS, a lot of options. And usually uh for people who like design and they like to play with colors and buttons and shapes, they usually take the front end direction but where the magic happens and the actual logic and functionality is within the back end. So if you are a backend developer, you'll be responsible for creating algorithms, functions logic. So it's like you're gonna be cooking the food in the kitchen or you're gonna be making the car run or work, maybe connecting to the database, connecting um um users services and security.

This is all back end features or jobs. As you see here, we have a lot of variety of uh backend languages, P HPC sharp provi there's a lot, what do I choose? There's a lot of options actually, as you know, from the title of this session, you should go with phpphp is one of the most famous uh technologies that is used for the web development at the moment. Um The majority of uh web applications and websites that are run at the moment globally, they're using PHP. So it's really on top of the world of programming uh web development. OK. What are the features? What are the good things about php that makes you want to learn it first? As we talked, the maximum market demand because a lot of websites are already running on uh php and a lot of people are using it and it's 100% guaranteed that if you work with PHP, you will find a job. Um Another advantage that it's an open source, as we said, it's mostly used and a lot of people develop codes and develop stuff to help PHP programmers and they're everywhere. So you can easily have access to any Snip of code or any library that is out there.

This is why we call it open source. And on top of that, it's free, almost free. I'm gonna say like it's super cheap to code with it, to deploy it to maintain it. It's super cheap. Also, it's fast and reliable, especially if you compare it to Python, which is another famous programming language for uh web development. Uh It's considered faster than Python and the uh the time load for the page is super, super small. Also another thing php is very simple and easy to learn. It has been around since 1995 I guess. And it's well documented. So there's a lot of resources. Um There's a lot of uh three youtube videos that you can learn from and there's a lot of books and a lot of resources to learn php. On top of that, it's user friendly, which means that um there's, you can easily understand it. Uh You can, um you can find resources everywhere and it's easy to understand and easy to grasp. Now, we're gonna talk here about something else a bit related to php. It's PHP frameworks. So usually when you program with PHP or with any other languages, especially if you do the front end, uh especially if you do, sorry, the backend, there's a lot of repetitive work that you do.

For example, uh let's say I want to um save a user or do something with a piece of information. I have to connect to the database, get the information, then close the connection or I want to make sure if I'm doing like es shopping, I want to make sure that I have uh a valid um card uh visa card number or whatever, all this stuff are repetitive and they're commonly used.

So in order not for me to spend a lot of time doing the same code again and again and again, there are already uh made php frameworks which are like libraries that can help you use their code. And these frameworks really make it easier for you. They save your time. They uh you can avoid just writing repetitive code and it, it can make sure that also that your processes are going uh in the right direction and you're correctly connecting to a database or doing security. Uh These are like a list of combination of the most famous PHP frameworks. Actually, the most famous are Lave and Symphony. Only around uh 12 or 13% of PHP deliver developers have skills in these two frameworks, which is which increases a very, very big demand on these two frameworks of uh of Symphony. Sorry. So as we said PHP is everywhere. So a lot of people are using PHP here, I put some examples of PHP. You can see that Facebook runs on PHP. Facebook, the uh the web, uh the social media application that you can do messaging chatting videos, there's a lot of feature features uh with it and it's all done with PHP.

Also wordpress, Jungla, Yahoo Wikipedia, all they're already developed with PHP with which creates a lot of demand on that. So actually, once you learn it, you know that you can find a job directly. OK. As we said, there's a lot of opportunities for uh for PHP developers and companies are really in this man's position. So they are uh looking for PHP developers, there's competitive salaries for them. And actually, I wanna say an example of my case uh I was living in Syria, which was, which is still considered a war zone country and with the sanctions and everything. And with that, I was able to find a job with PHP in Europe. So, you know, even if there's a chance, like a small, small, small chance you will still find a job with PHP. And um, here I put like the average wage of uh range of salaries, but of course, it depends if you're a junior, a junior or an experienced PHP developer, but this can be the average salary. And of course, if you're a freelancer or an employee, of course, you can land a job in both situations if you want to be a freelancer or if you want a full time uh a full time job. OK. Let's say you land a job in, in PHP.

What do you do as a PHP developer? You're in the office, what do you do? Usually you're, you're gonna be responsible for writing server site. B what does that mean? It means the part of the code that the user doesn't see. You're gonna be storing data, organizing it, managing all the databases, you're gonna be creating functions, algorithms and all the logic and you're gonna be supporting the front end developers. For example, there's a button on the front end uh on the website, the front end developers create the button, makes it look nice and you're gonna support them by doing the functionality of that button. Like a submit or register or any button that you see on the uh on a website. That's just an example. So I hope after this, I convinced you that you should learn php, how you should learn it. What are the resources that you can learn from here? I put uh a list of my favorite books to learn php that are available on Amazon. As you can see, there's a lot of them that are mixed with my SQL because we were saying that PHP is a backend uh language. And usually in the back end, you have to connect with the database and uh manage it, do some instructions with the database. And my SQL is considered as a language to communicate with the database, get information from it, store it or anything related.

So usually PHP and my SQL go together SQL. Actually, it is not very hard to uh to learn php as well. It's easy to learn fairly easy. They're also here. For example, you can find the courses on Code Academy to learn PHP. Also, there's a very, very interesting uh free website which is called W three schools.com. There, you can find sex of uh PHP instructions in a nice hierarchy. You can start like with the basics and then go into details more and more. And if I'm not mistaken, they can give you certificates that you know PHP. After you learn php and you want to practice it, you can go to um a lot of uh tools that will help you um test your knowledge. For example, lead code is a platform where they will give you uh problems, math problems or any kind of problems that you need to program in a certain language. And of course you can use PHP there, you can test your knowledge in PHP and then you can, for example, get coins and stuff. It's really nice and interactive for you uh to learn PHP from that uh that website. Now, maybe you're wondering, OK, would it be worth uh learning PHP? How much time do I need? Will it be?

I don't know, outdated by then actually, to learn it to start creating your first web page, maybe it would take you like a month to, to start creating and working on that, maybe creating multiple, it might take you 23 months to let's say half a master or some, maybe a bit of master in PHP.

It would take you 6 to 7 months. So fairly, it's not a long time. You will not invest a lot of time learning PHP and as it's easy and well documented. So you're gonna find the resources like that. Another thing. What's the future, as we were saying? OK, what if it was outdated? What's the future of PHP? Actually, as we were saying PHP, it's still on top of the development world. So a lot of websites are still using it. Uh Usually uh start ups would always go for PHP because it's cheap established businesses already use PHP. So it has a bright future and the job is guaranteed in PHP. But for the far future, maybe 10 to 20 years, there's a bit of a concern. Uh because Python is somehow attracting more attention. Python is another uh backend language because Python deals much better with machine learning and artificial intelligence and everyone knows that this is the direction where we're going. So unless PHP takes like a leap to catch up with Python, there's, I don't know, some people are a bit um afraid that it might lose popularity. But as Facebook is based in PHP, they're investing a lot in making the best out of it, especially in PHP seven, which is a new release, which is really, really has a nice and really improved features.

So I don't think it's gonna lose the popularity anytime soon or maybe even in the future. So at the end, if you're looking for a freelance opportunity or a full time job PHP is a very good option or if you want to go into technology, PHP is good programming languages, especially what development is easy, maybe machine learning and A I can be super hard to start with, especially if you don't have a technical background.

But with PHP, it's easy to learn and start working as soon as possible. I hope you enjoyed the, the session and get uh and you got the most out of it. And I hope I convinced you to learn PHP if you need to connect with me or you have any more questions. Uh Don't hesitate to chat with me on linkedin and uh I'm open for questions. Thank you all. Have a nice day.