5 Reasons to Love PHP

By Sunday September 27, 2009

I’m currently learning PHP, I don’t claim to be an expert but I do tend to specialise ain the areas I use for my projects but lately I’ve really started to see how PHP is so much better than say ASP or even ASP.Net.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure if I knew those languages properly and spent hours training in it, I might have a different opinion but considering I knew very little programming before starting PHP here are five reasons so far that I love it.

1) It Makes Sense

This is a big issue for me, I can read someone else’s code and understand roughly what they are trying to do, it seems more logical than ASP which seemed to me more bloated for the simple tasks like connecting to a database which leads me nicely to…

2) MySQL Integration

I’m not getting into the argument of which is better or why, but trust me in that having spent years using MS Access for my databases, I found it quite an easy transition plus with PHP it makes it so easy to connect to the databases, security is dealt with and in general I just found it so much smoother and straight forward which is what it should be.

Also another thing I loved about it is that I didn’t need to have some sort of driver path or connections file that I never really understood – PHP lets me do this literally in a few steps by just telling it what the database is called, what table you want and then the username and password to log in.

After that, queries are pretty straightforward to master for most tasks. SQL is not that hard for 90% of things you want to do with the database.

3) jQuery Works Nicely

The ability to slip between HTML and PHP made me appreciate the power of jQuery because now I can call PHP pages, get a post back and update my pages – basically make AJAX calls and it generally just works without too much effort on my part.

I know jQuery would work with ASP but to be honest, I haven’t a clue how to call an ASP file, do something then post back. I’m sure it’s a lot easier with ASP.net but hey – it would have to be seriously easier for me to take this one off the list.

4) It’s Free

That’s right – it’s absoloutly free! It’s open source which means it’s open for everyone to develop their own stuff on it from frameworks to save you time to fully fledged free versions of favourite applications.

Everyone loves free right?

5) Error Handling

Obviously you still get errors in development, but it’s generally a lot more user friendly that asp – which in my experience gave me a really vague error code, told me the line but didn’t tell me what I was looking for.

PHP tells me what it expected, what line and what it could be. I can then go to that line, look at the type of error its throwing out – like if it expected a number, if it’s missing a quote or something. I’ll do anything for an easy life.

Conclusion

Okay so this post is pretty small and I’m sure there will be some of you who are reading thinking “I prefer ASP.net” and that’s totally fine too – I’m only sharing my experiences to date, and so far it’s winning by a long shot. I did try learning ASP.net before anyone asls, but I got so bogged down with procedures, sub procedures and it generally didn’t make my life very fun lol.