Chapter 1. Introduction

PHP has grown from a set of tools for personal home page development to the world's most popular web programming language, and it now powers many of the Web's most frequented destinations. Along with such a transition comes new concerns, such as performance, maintainability, scalability, reliability, and (most importantly) security .

Unlike language features such as conditional expressions and looping constructs, security is abstract. In fact, security is not a characteristic of a language as much as it is a characteristic of a developer. No language can prevent insecure code, although there are language features that can aid or hinder a security-conscious developer.