On 11 Feb 2005 05:10:28 -0800,
surfunbear@yahoo.com wrote:
[color=blue]
>
> I went out and bought a PHP book. I figured I wanted to explore the
>possibility of web development in case I found myself between jobs. I
>have a little anxiety about the current economy and want to bone up on
>my skills to help me feel more secure if you know what I mean.
>
> I have a computer science degree, have done alot of C++ work, a good
>deal of perl and some java. I'm a talented developer and have worked
>with some large applications and complex code and designed a few
>complicated things as well. I wasn't sure if web development tends to
>be challenging or not. Alot of web sites are pretty lame, some html and
>forms. No one is going to pay me much money for doing work that any
>shmoe can do by throwing together some html gui front end stuff and it
>wouldn't be much fun for me either.
>So I wasn't sure what to expect. I bought the perl/CGI book to get a
>low level feel for web stuff and decided to read up on PHP.
>I was amazed at how PHP is just basicaly C++, Java, and Perl thrown
>together with a few other interesting things. I skimmed through the
>language section. It was kind of like, yep that looks familiar C switch
>statements, various types of class functionality, what a breeze ! Been
>there done that, no problemo ! such an easy learning curve there !
>
>
>Is PHP mainly used for web development ? It looks like it
>could be a general purpose programming language.[/color]
It is mainly used for Web development, but there is nothing to stop
you using for other things. There are plenty of examples around for
no-web and even standalone exe programs.
remember though, PHP is an interpreted language. Don't expect good
performance for compute intensive tasks. For pushing data around and
general logic type stuff (typical in web environments) it is fine.
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>Is there much heavy duty PHP web development where you have alot of
>reusable modules and complexity ? I imagine there must be alot of web
>development that doesn't use half the stuff they provide in the
>language.[/color]
There's plenty of heavy duty duty stuff out there. Just follow some
links from the php.net website or look at sourceforge and you will get
a good idea.
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> I saw you can imbed PHP in your HTML. That seems too funky except in
>small doses. I did some XSLT, using xml/html to write code seems a bit
>weird. Anyway, I am still reading, I'm only 1/3 or 1/4 through the
>book. It's moderately thick. PHP is a freebie right ?[/color]
For small pages, emedding php/html is no real issue. For larger
projects you would use one of the existing frameworks to create more
complex sites.
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>Anyone use C# or ASP.net ? Any thoughts on those ? I feel a tendency to
>want to shy away from any microsoft language for some reason. We have
>Visual C++, I had to port some stuff to that. It's seemed heavy and
>complex. I didn't like the documentation and various complexities on
>how to install .dll files through whatever they called that installer.
>Unix is definetly cryptic, but for some reason I like Unix types of
>things better.[/color]
Most of our code is ASP.NET using C#, but I use php for quick stuff
and some http services as it is a lot easier to get something working
fast.
If you know C# then you will be amazed at how similar PHP5 is. In many
cases you can translate C# to PHP5 almost line by line with only small
changes (adding $ for variables for example).
If you look at the PRADO php framework, this is very close to the
ASP.NET framework also.
BTW I do all of this under Windows with IIS5/6. There is no real
complexity to install it. You should be up and running withing 10
minutes of downloading the zip file.
Use PHP designer
http://www.mpsoftware.dk/ under Windows and you will
never look back ;)
Cheers,
Gary.
new to PHP 
