First, in the spirit of full disclosure, I use PHP but prefer Ruby.

Yes, all things that are popular are good and work well!

Sarcasm aside, using this logic Van Gogh should never have picked up a paintbrush because a billion talentless painters had done so before him.

No offense, but if you've been using the same language for eight years without any regrets, I don't see you as having enough perspective to offer up much useful information.

I don't recall the original poster saying anything to the affect of "I've only ever used PHP for eight years." Furthermore, the thought that someone with as many years experience would not have something useful to say is equally ludicrous.

As far as I can tell, PHP is popular because it's perfectly adequate language for cranking out some basic dynamic pages, and it's very easy to learn and set up. However, just like Visual Basic, the things that make it useful in the shallow end of the pool keep it from being useful at scale.

Not the scale issue again! Someone's not been keeping up with their reading. "Basic, dynamic pages" like Flickr, Yahoo, and Wikipedia are fairly popular. I for one wouldn't mind having the scaling problems of these sites.

the eternal trickle of security issues

Means an eternal trickle of security fixes and is a product more of PHP's widespread use than poor design.

apparently designed by amateurs

Which segues perfectly to something I'm almost too embarassed to call to your attention... Isn't that how many great open source projects get their start?! I don't know why I let the haters bait me but it troubles me when I see those wishing to increase knowledge denegrated by others.

I bought the second addition of RWLS and HLE also, I like HLE much better. I had to order HLE from the publisher so I had RWLS a couple days earlier. I've been reading the same topics in both books, HLE has been more up to date so far. Something that really annoys me about RWLS is being referred to so many other sections. I want to simply read the chapter of interest and learn from it, not jump around all over the book. I will continue to read both books by topic together, and I may come to appreciate RWLS. So far, it hasn't been as helpful as HLE. Compare them before you buy, I wasn't able, HLE wasn't on the shelf yet.