Simon Janes I don't use PHP much any more, but I'm stunned at how prevalent it is in the web-based business world. Haven't updated my ZCE 4 and I understand that PHP is now v7.x. Shrug.

Mark Dain PHP has changed a *lot* since 4, I'd recommend you checkout 7.1 and the work the PHP-FIG group is doing in standardizing a lot of common stuff. PHP is starting to clean up their act and 7 continues that with a stricter type hinting. Since 4 to 7, we've shed a lot of the things that were giving PHP a bad reputation, like safe mode, magic quotes, ext/mysql (use mysqli or PDO now). There's full class/OOP support (rather than the fuckery PHP 4 had). Standardized PSR-0 and PSR-4 autoloading (the latter works with namespaces). There's so much that's changed and improved. It's not the language you remember, I promise.