PHP has come a long way. It existed long before Node.js and was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. It stood for Personal Home Page originally. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group (https://www.php.net/). PHP was originally developed as a templating language that allowed us to mix HTML with PHP code itself, just like Twig (https://twig.symfony.com/) and Pug (https://pugjs.org/) do these days.
Now, PHP is more than just a templating language. Over the years, it has evolved into a general-purpose scripting language and object-oriented language, especially suited for server-side web development. You can still use it for templating, but we should make use of its full power in modern PHP development. If you want to check out what else PHP can do, visit https://www.php.net/manual/en/intro-whatcando.php.
At the time of writing this book, the current stable version of PHP is 7.4.x. If you are getting started with PHP, start with PHP 7.4. If you are...
