Years of Linux dedication by its fanatics have led it through some serious evolution since its inception by Linus Torvalds. Since then, many distributions have surfaced with well-established communities.
It was modeled after core computer science principals in an effort to provide efficiency backed by tried and true security features. This makes it a perfect candidate to function as a server operating system.
In the end, there's just something alluring about free software.
As far back as I can remember, Apache has been the authority on handling HTTP requests.
It's mod_rewrite functionality offers experienced developers an excellent avenue for customizing system URL's and routing web traffic via the infamous regular expression. This helps achieve a positive, user-friendly experience while preserving SEO value on your website.
It's so easy to configure out of the box that you almost forget it's just sitting there... biding its time...
I'm no database administrator, but sometimes I play one. MySQL provides a perfectly lightweight database solution that scales well.
Coupled with PHP, it becomes an invaluable resource for maintaining all your persistant data. With front-end tools like phpMyAdmin, administration and data migration is a snap.
The Hypertext Preprocessor has been around since 1995. It's been instrumental is paving the way for web development on open-source systems. It's weakly typed, but far from weak. PHP delivers critical server-side functionality in today's dynamic world of development.
Without it, you wouldn't have your beloved Facebook as we know it. It is also the preferred choice for a wide variety of extremely popular content management systems, some good, some not so good.
"Can you do that in HTML 5?"
"What does that mean?!"
The newest specification on the original markup for encoding web pages has come a long way since its piecemeal creation back in the days of the early Interwebs. The W3C is now putting their best foot forward to ensure that HTML leans heavily on contextual syntax. This is important for readability at the search engine level and is great in terms of universal design to assist people with handicaps more effectively.
Cascading Style Sheets enable us to separate our markup from our visuals. It has evolved with HTML in form and function. With the upcoming CSS 3 specification, effects will be available that would have previously required any number of images to pull off. This grants us a boost to page load speed and increases our toolkit for making those websites extra pretty.
Many of these prototypical features are already in heavy use including support for previously unusable fonts. Check out Google Web Fonts for free fonts anyone can use.
jQuery is the coolest thing since javascript even though it is javascript. Emerging as the industry standard in extensible browser functionality, jQuery uses javascript as a spring-board to offer serious power to client-side applications.
Without it, you would have a very sad HTML 5. Even the vertical slider you're reading this on is powered by jQuery.