All right.
So I'll start this video off with a quick anecdote, stupid story.
I have a course online right now.
It's done relatively well, a lot of students, and it focuses on a bunch of technologies, including
HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
We talk about Node.js as well, talking about MongoDB and a bunch of other tools that go along with
them.
And at least a couple of times a day, you know, I get comments or questions or people demanding that
it should cover PHP or it should cover Ruby or why doesn't it cover C or Java?
And those are valid questions, right?
People have reasons for wanting to learn different things.
So I'm not trying to diminish their concerns or not.
I'm not trying to say they shouldn't want to learn those, but there's no way that any course can teach
all of those, and there's no reason that it should.
Because, like I said, you only need one, maybe two.
So the reason I bring that up is that it's kind of a contentious thing.
People, especially students, when people are learning to program, it's overwhelming.
Everyone tells you to learn something else.
It's very confusing, you know?
Do you learn something that's easy to learn because it's easy to learn?
Or is it better to learn something that's popular and more people are using, even if it means that
it's tougher?
You know, what's the best route?
And I think the answer is there's a different way for everyone.
It's kind of a lame cop out answer.
So when you're making an online course, you have to decide.
And what I decided for this course is we're focusing primarily on Node and the typical kind of conventional
choice would be PHP.
So I want to talk about why I made that decision.
And the first reason is that I personally am not crazy about PHP.
I've done some work with it, some work with WordPress.
Like I said, it used to be very popular.
There's still a lot of people using it, but it is no longer the reigning champion of programming languages
on the web.
Like seven years ago it was that was the language that you used if you wanted to make a web app.
But nowadays, there's so much more competition.
People are writing things in Node or they're writing them in Ruby and tons of other languages, Scala
closure, all these different languages that you could use.
And they all have benefits, right?
They all have kind of they came later, they were able to see what worked, what didn't work, where
problems were with other languages.
They all kind of try to address different things.
So I won't go into a lot of the technical details.
There's an interesting article online is PHP the most hated programming language?
Not that that is an excuse to not use it, but it's interesting.
I'll link to it if you want to read about it.
It basically talks about how PHP got so popular back in 1995 when it started and then where does the
hate towards it come from?
And largely the consensus at least is that PHP was kind of cobbled together.
It wasn't a consciously crafted as this says here, programming language.
Things were added over the years and there's inconsistencies.
There are some security issues, but you could actually say the same thing about JavaScript, which
is a valid criticism that it was created in I think it's nine or ten days kind of as an experiment.
It wasn't some crazy planned out language and things have been added over the years and they're constantly
updating the specification for JavaScript.
So that's not necessarily why I chose to not teach PHP and choose Node and JavaScript.
Instead, it's really more about the data that's on this page.
This is from 2016.
It's a Stack Overflow server.
They do with how many?
56,000 coders who answered the survey and there was 45 questions.
So if we scroll down and click on technology and go look at the technology's tabs, we can quickly see,
first of all, SQL, very popular, good news.
And you can see here we have PHP, which is in 2016, around 25%.
If we go back to 2013, notice that it started at 35%, then went down to 28%, then up a little to
29 and then down to 25.
So the lowest it's been.
So you can see there are charts online that I couldn't find any that were copyright free, essentially
the head of license that I would be able to show you the image.
But there are charts online.
You can see the decline.
It's not a very steep decline, but there is a decline.
And at the same time, if we look at Node.js here, which is was at 7.5%.
Now it's going up to 9.9%, 13%, 17%.
It's growing very quickly in comparison to other things around it.
And then also, if you take a look, you know, JavaScript is up here as number one, which is great
because Node.js uses JavaScript syntax.
It is JavaScript.
We'll talk about that if you're not familiar with it.
So if you notice the trends down here, more people use JavaScript than any other programming language.
PHP appears to be falling out of favor as node and Angular emerge.
That's kind of the main takeaway trend.
And if we scroll down a bit more, we can take a look at the top tech on StackOverflow can see JavaScript
up nice and high still.
If we look at trending stuff, you'll basically see that it's all JavaScript.
Well, almost all JavaScript related react.
It's JavaScript.
We've got Node.
Nowhere on here is PHP.
Now I don't want to say that you only pick something based off of it if it's trendy or not.
That's not the point here.
The point is more that I picked Node because it is something that will prepare you for the future and
if you want to learn PHP there are so many options up there and I didn't want to just make another version
of a course that could have been made a couple of years ago.
I wanted to make the most up to date current course, so basically to a decision that I made.
There is not one answer.
You could still make a great PHP in my SQL course today.
I'll probably end up adding a little PHP section, but it's not going to be the focus of the course
and minor, minor thing.
But it is interesting if you look at top paying jobs or if we scroll down and look at what a node developer
on average around $85,000, look at PHP minor.
Well 10,000 difference.
So not that that's why I chose to do that but it is interesting to see.
And then finally, if we look at the correlated technologies, you can see PHP and SQL.
There is a tight correlation there.
Right.
But there's also JavaScript and SQL, which is what we're going to be focusing on.
And that's becoming very, very popular, a great combination.
So that's where so that's sort of some of the data behind why I picked that, why I came to this decision,
if you're curious about it.
One other thing.
There's a good core post about why PHP is losing popularity, why people are trying to do Node and stuff
and Ruby and why people are down on PHP, which hopefully the takeaway is that that's not my intention
is that I am not trying to make PHP seem bad.
I am just trying to show you another option.
All right.
So thankfully, this is an optional video.
You didn't have to sit through this and not that you have to sit through any video, but well, we're
done with it now.
Thanks for sitting through that if you chose to.
Next up, we're going to introduce our very exciting, fun project.