If you want to learn how to swim, you use baby floats, not neoprene wet-suits (witch are obviously better for professional swimming). This post is not about what programming language is better (it is impossible to answer that), this post is about choosing the best language to learn how to code - the language that gives the most opportunities to our students in Miami.
Learning curve
Learning the PHP language is not about the syntax - that is easy. The challenge relies in the framework, special techniques, etc. You can say that Ruby and PHP are easy to learn. But Ruby is about one framework: Rails, and Rails has a long learning curve (Click here to learn more). On the other hand, PHP has many frameworks; you can start using the easy ones (like Phpixie), and later on use other frameworks like Laravel that will probably have more tools to build whatever product/website you want to build.
Active developers community
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Documentation
PHP documentation is clear, concise, and spectacular. I cannot remember having a question that was hard to find. When you have such an active community, everything flows. PHP is the third language with most discussions on Stack Overflow, and all the big websites that teach to code have active PHP courses and tutorials.
PHP is, by far, the most used language on the web:
With 82% of the websites and web applications using PHP, it is the most used language. For example: Facebook, Yahoo, Tumblr and Wikipedia (and 65% of the world's top 1 million websites), as well as WordPress (which runs 25% of internet websites) are built on PHP.
There are 2.3 (230%) more job posts for PHP than Ruby in Miami's top job portals.
Which programing language will provide you with more job opportunities? By now, you should have enough information to answer that question. Here is some research performed on the top 3 job posting portals in Miami: Indeed, Glassdoor and Dice. We searched for all the jobs in these 3 portals that contained the word "PHP" and, in the other hand, we searched again for for the word "Ruby." Here are the results:
| Jobs containing the keyword "Ruby" | Jobs containing the keyword "PHP" | |
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Glassdoor.com |
114 jobs Click here and search for yourself | |
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Indeed.com |
168 jobs Click here and search for yourself | |
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Dice.com |
8 results Click here and search for yourself | |
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Total: | **136** |
314 |
Salary for a PHP developer in Miami
PHP developers make an average salary of $80,000 nationwide and Miami is not the exception. It takes 5 minutes to search at indeed.com: look for PHP jobs that pay more than $75,000 a year in Miami, and you will find more than 70 job vacancies. Here are some of them:
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Ascendo Resources: Senior PHP Developer at $100,000/year.
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World NetMedia: [Lead Software Developer](https://www.indeed.com/rc/clk?jk=ce19d277c156a3d4 - LAMP) at $100,000/year.
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Cutting Edge Recruiting - Full Stack PHP Developer at ~$100,000/year.
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Tal Group - Web Developer PHP at $80,000/year.
We are not saying that you will earn that much from Day 1, but those jobs only ask for 3-5 years experience. If you are good, you could probably start earning $40,000 to $50,000 a year and start growing from there.
Conclusion
In the end, bootcamps do not train developers to be slaves of the language. For a true programmer, it does not really matter what to use, it is what and how to code that matters. That is exactly what we will teach you: Strong fundamentals about programming, how to be a self-learner, how to research on Google, design patterns, coding techniques, among others. The only reasons we choose PHP is to make the learning process to our students easier and because we think PHP gives them better chances of finding a good job.