Modern PHP

Back in 1995, software engineer Rasmus Lerdorf needed an easier way to maintain his own web page, and wrote a set of programs he called Personal Home Page, or PHP. He soon open sourced the software, but never anticipated it would become the dominant web-page programming language it is today, Now, PHP powers more than 80% of websites that report the language they use, according to W3Techs. PHP usage extends well beyond personal blogging sites to giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia.

The longevity and popularity of PHP has both pros and cons. The positive is that you can easily find lots of PHP tutorials and other resources online. The downside is that many of the existing resources still recommend outdated practices that result in slow and unstable apps. To address this problem, Josh Lockhart has written Modern PHP, the go-to resource today's developers have desperately needed to help them modernize their PHP apps.

As you update your approach to developing PHP apps, it also makes sense to reconsider how you're delivering them. The Apache HTTP server debuted when the internet was new, and worked fine at the time. But Nginx is purpose-built to handle the vastly greater demands that your apps now face, with an event-driven design that is much lighter-weight and uses fewer system resources than Apache. The result is higher performance from your PHP applications.