As a developer, I am frightened by PHP.

I assume that it is possible to write clean, maintainable, secure code in PHP. But if I sat down and tried to write a web app on my own in PHP, what are the odds that I would do it right--particularly w.r.t. security? If I look for tutorials and reference materials that teach secure PHP programming, how do I know which of these documents are written by people who actually know what they're talking about?

And after taking into account all the effort to learn and use good PHP practices, is PHP really more difficult than one of the Perl, Python, or Ruby frameworks?