It has been a long time (nearly a decade) since I learned PHP and used it on a near-daily basis. Back then, it was version 5. At the time I found a job with a different company, PHP 7 was on the horizon. I vowed to learn it at some point, but never did. Fast forward five years and, unbeknown to me, PHP 8 came out and established itself.
Drew the Husky bounding around
A few to several months back, I used my old PHP knowledge to update the Website for a family friend's kennels and cattery business, since it wasn't responsive and looked like it had been made in the early 2000s. However, a couple of months ago, I received a notification from the hosting provider that they'll be upgrading the server's version of PHP to 8.x at the start of October and all developers are advised to test their production code for compatibility. Deciding that this would be a good opportunity to skip version 7 and learn PHP 8, I found and downloaded a full tutorial on it. I glossed over it briefly and then forgot about it. Today, however, I received a reminder email that the upcoming change is only a month away. This spurred me into action.
Today, I have started going through the course and making notes on both what's changed and things I never learned. Since I already know quite a lot of PHP, I am not going to document everything in the course, only the points I need to learn and remember. Once I have finished a section (of which there are three), I'll publish my notes here, for the benefit of others. If that interests you, keep an eye on this blog for when I publish updates. If, on the other hand, you know HTML, CSS & JavaScript (ES6+) and want to learn the server-side language from scratch, I recommend finding the Learning PHP the Right Way playlist by Programming with Gio on YouTube. Here are the first two videos from that, to get you started:
Happy coding; I'm going back to learning PHP 8 and applying updates to my existing code.
Post Thumbnail copyright Siteground. (View their blog post for an overview of changes since PHP 7. For me, one of the most advantageous changes, of which there are many, is enabling strict/strong typing. I like strict/strong typing. Another is named arguments and the third is the null-safe operator. PHP might actually be cool to work with, finally, instead of a horrible and headache-inducing pain in the neck.)
