If you are getting started with PHP, start with the current stable release of PHP 5.6. PHP has added powerful new features over the last few years. For eg:
-Object-oriented Programming
-Functional Programming
-Meta Programming

Though the incremental version number difference between 5.2 and 5.6 is small, it represents major improvements.

For me Closures is the big thing.

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php 5.3.29 is the latest version of php
Benefits offer by latest version of php are:-

• Support for most MySQL features
• Browse and drop databases, tables, views, fields and indexes.
• Create, copy, drop, rename and alter databases, tables, fields and indexes.
• Maintenance server, databases and tables, with proposals on server configuration.
• Execute, edit and bookmark any SQL-statement, even batch-queries.
• Manage MySQL users and privileges.
• Manage stored procedures and triggers.
• Import data from CSV and SQL.
• Export data to various formats: CSV, SQL, XML, PDF, ISO/IEC 26300 - OpenDocument Text and Spreadsheet, Word, Excel, LATEX and others.

7.0 comming soon

PHP 5.3+ versions are available as both VC6 and VC9.

PHP 5.5.x is the latest version right now.
finally keyword added
New password hashing API
The foreach control structure now supports unpacking nested arrays into separate variables via the list() construct.
the range() function as a generator
empty() supports arbitrary expressions
etc.

Actually its PHP 5.6.x now, and PHP 7 is already released as well.

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can anyone point out the difference between ver 5.6 and 7.0.x?

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7
I found it easy to find out problems just by putting on debug mode and watching for errors popping up and then fixing as i ran scripts
my only issues was with some oo class stuff, besides that not many errors to the switch to 7

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Latest version of PHP 5.6.22

At the time of writing this, PHP 7 is quite supported and already available on all major web hosting platforms. We`ve transferred all of our client sites (WordPress) to PHP 7, and benchmarks show that the speed has doubled and memory consumption fell sharply. Can`t recommend it enough. There were some incompatibilities with some plugins, but we straightened them out. So far, so good.

php-7.0.6 is the latest version going on very very recently.

PHP latest version has 7.0.6.

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Current Stable PHP Version is 7.0.8

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