Codecademy Launches New Free PHP Course

Codecademy introduced a new free course today called Learn PHP. The company, which offers free coding courses, is rebuilding its PHP education after removing all of its PHP courses in 2017.

A Codecademy representative explained that the courses were outdated and that their team thought PHP was declining in popularity:

The PHP courses were very old, buggy, and outdated. They were the least used courses on Codecademy by far, and declining in use all the time, just as PHP itself is declining in popularity in the web development world. Student demand was far higher towards making, for example, more content in other languages like JavaScript or offer all-new languages like C#, rather than continuing to maintain PHP. Continued support and maintenance of any course for us costs money, and hiring PHP specialists to rewrite a course costs more money, but the market for PHP is very small. So, the decision was clear – to sunset this course.

PHP was created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf, and it is still going strong 25 years later. Roughy 80% of websites run on PHP. Redmonk’s 2019 language rankings put PHP at #4 behind JavaScript, Java, and Python, based on data from GitHub and Stack Overflow.

Codecademy’s new Learn PHP course offers users an introduction to the fundamentals of PHP with language-specific syntax. Prerequisites include basic HTML. Students will learn about PHP variables and the string and number data types. Codecademy Pro users will get more quizzes and will create a portfolio project to showcase their new skills, but the basic course is free. The course currently takes approximately three hours to complete, and the company plans to add more content in the future.