It's a great day to learn PHP!
If we tried to write 'It's a great day' without the escape character, PHP would think the string ended early and cause an error.
The escape slash tells PHP to treat the next character as part of the string instead of as code. In this example, it allows the apostrophe in "It's" to display correctly without ending the string. Escape characters are important whenever special characters could be confused with PHP syntax.