PHP is a decent language and ecosystem these days. Perhaps one of the minority of ecosystems that are actually on the rise rather than on the decline. It still

PHP is a decent language and ecosystem these days. Perhaps one of the minority of ecosystems that are actually on the rise rather than on the decline. It still has lots of warts, but whatever. Forget the idea that PHP is "taking what you can" or not a sane language -- you're in it now so might as well get up to speed with best practices and use it the best you can. I promise you can build compelling software in PHP. http://www.phptherightway.com/ http://www.phptherightway.com/ is a great resource for most things you'll need to know when working with modern PHP. Definitely start here. Familiarize yourself with the ecosystem by poking at the most popular frameworks, at least skimming the docs to understand the types of things they provide and how they're structured: Zend, Symfony and Symfony Components, Laravel, Slim, Silex. Study WordPress, the "stereotypically bad" piece of software, for anti-patterns, but there's also a lot of good stuff in there and some improvements on the roadmap. Composer is the npm of PHP. Check out packagist (horrible UI though) or browse github's PHP repos to find some of PHP's commonly used packages, like Monolog and phpunit. You can build a simple app in minutes in Laravel, and even put together a small product MVP using 90% boilerplate code within a matter of days on Laravel. Since there's a growing ecosystem for these tools now, it's getting easier and easier to write quality software in PHP, and it's actually a relatively pleasant experience. Plus shipping and managing PHP in production is a breeze -- it's the most widely supported web platform, after all. We've got support on great CI systems like circleci and scrutinizer-ci. Anyways, start there and good luck!