I remember pulling my hair out over PHP's type-system. The boolean comparisons early on were strange to me. Explode is really useful for string manipulation,

I remember pulling my hair out over PHP's type-system. The boolean comparisons early on were strange to me. Explode is really useful for string manipulation, for some reason I had issues with certain ways of doing split. As for frameworks, I know the two big ones are Code Igniter and CakePHP, but the discussions I've seen have boiled down to documentation, which Code Igniter really does well. I've used Code Igniter and only have a few complaints, but overall, it's not bad. It's hard to compare with Ruby on Rails, but overall, PHP is a fairly quick and dirty solution and it "just works."