Hello, my name is Charles Severance. And I'd like to welcome you to Web Applications for Everybody. One of the questions that I get a lot is, why do you teach PHP? And that's because I'm old. And I've seen a lot. And the newest and latest thing is often not the thing that lasts into the future, as you can sort of well understand with my steampunk costume. Steampunk is an alternate future where not all the cool things that have been invented get invented. And we imagine what it would be like if all these cool things didn't get invented. And the problem is, is the latest [COUGH] tricky framework like Angular 1, or Angular 2, or Angular 4, or Angular 75, I mean, they're fun and you hear about them in a coffee shop. But what I've learned is I've got code running that's 10 years old. And that code is not sexy. And I didn't hear it in a coffee shop. As a matter of fact, the code that I wrote 10 to 15 years ago, where I heard somebody talking about something cool in a coffee shop, that code's crap, doesn't work, hard to use, totally broken. But the boring stuff, the non-sexy stuff, I still have that running. So for me, it's kind of like the future is not always as rosy as it seems, and some of these things that are fun. And by the way if you're going to use one of those things and start your little company, it's fine. You're just going to have to throw it away in a couple of years. The other thing that's important is this course is not about coding. This course is about the request response cycle, how a browser works with a web server, works with a database, what SQL is, what HTML is, and what AJAX is, and what the layout of a web application is. And PHP just happens to be sort of part of that. And I really want you to learn more than one language. And so if I teach you PHP now and later you go to take a boot camp on Ruby on Rails, you're going to rock in the Ruby on Rails bootcamp. And then you can go get a Ruby on Rails job, right? And so I'm really into more than one language. And so why don't I pick the language to start in teaching that's the easiest to install, the cheapest to host, the most widely used? And literally there are probably more PHP jobs than any other job for web application development. And so, I'm not really doing you a favor if I teach you something like Angular Seven. There might be a few really cool jobs at Angular Seven. I know Angular Seven doesn't even exist yet. But there might be some cool jobs for Angular Four. And then in a week there's no more cool jobs, right? So I want you to take something with you that'll last you the rest of your career. The other thing I think is important is we're trying to teach a worldwide audience here, not just an audience of people in San Francisco or Seattle who need Ruby on Rails, or need Django, or whatever the latest thing that the kids in the coffee shop have dreamed up. And so I want to teach you something that you can use as easily in Iran, or India, or Pakistan, as you can in the United States. And so PHP is that universal language for the web. Other people say, why don't you use Python? You teach a Python course? I love Python, you teach great. And Python is not designed for the web. Python is great for data mining and data analysis. And it's a great language to learn. But just because it's a language you know, doesn't mean that it's the right language for the web. And so PHP, everything about the PHP community, if you go from PHP 1 to 2, to 3, to 4, to 5, to 7, they skipped PHP 6, every innovation that's ever been put into PHP has been to make it better and more suitable as a way to build web applications. Scalable web applications, Facebook uses it, all kinds of people use it. They tweak it. All these things are high-performance and easily used and really wonderful. And they may not be the right thing for you. But I think, without a doubt, they're the right thing that you should learn for the very first time. So I encourage you to enjoy your learning of PHP. Understand it may not be the only thing that you do. It may not be the thing that you get paid to do. But we are going to build a foundation so that everyone can learn how to program web applications. See you in class.
