I am now using Patreon and YouTube Memberships to share improved and updated lesson material, and for a small fee you can access all the material either from my memberships or Patreon, depending on your preference. I have worked hard, and done my best to help you understand what I teach.

What Kind of Language is PHP?
Let’s get into some technical jargon.

Programming languages are divided into groups depending on their characteristics. For example interpreted/compiled, strongly/loosely typed, dynamically/statically typed.

PHP is often called a “scripting language” and it’s an interpreted language. If you’ve used compiled languages like C or Go or Swift, the main difference is that you don’t need to compile a PHP program before you run it.

Those languages are compiled and the compiler generates an executable program that you then run. It’s a 2-steps process.

How Variables Work in PHP
Variables in PHP start with the dollar sign $, followed by an identifier, which is a set of alphanumeric chars and the underscore _ char.

You can assign a variable any type of value, like strings (defined using single or double quotes):

I introduced the use of strings before when we talked about variables and we defined a string using this notation:

Loops are another super useful control structure.

We have a few different kinds of loops in PHP: while, do while, for, and foreach.

Let’s see them all!