Why shouldn't you learn PHP?
PHP is for web application development. If you're doing web development
you need to know about and learn PHP.
Perl was designed for the command-line, shell executable world, and adapted
to the web, it was never ideally suited to the web, and had to be adapted to it.
Perl is very useful, but has many limitations to it that make it less than
ideal for web application programming. ( Perl is on my list of favorite
tools right next to PHP )
PHP was designed for the web, and can be adapted for the command-line,
the inverse of Perl. I've found plenty of use for PHP on the command
line for a lot of uses similar to Perl.
Make no mistake, both are powerful, and both are important. Both are
used for web applications, but PHP is the most popular simply because
it is designed for web applications. It is also FREE, unlike a lot of
other web application languages, i.e. ASP, Coldfusion.
If you stop by Netcraft and look at what the dominant technologies are
with respect to what businesses are using, you'll see what the trends
are, and why learning PHP makes sense if you are doing applications on
the internet.
First, the apache web server dominates the net:
http://www.netcraft.com/Survey/Reports/0504/ http://www.netcraft.com/Survey/Repor...nt/graphs.html
Next question, what to use with Apache?
Apache uses modules and dll's to make it work with different
configurations. What are the most popular modules?
http://www.securityspace.com/s_surve...pachemods.html http://www.securityspace.com/s_surve....html?mod=UEhQ http://www.php.net/usage.php
So, by the numbers you can see it's important to at least know
why learning PHP is important if you are going to do any kind
of serious web application development. Many, if not all of the
most popular shopping carts use PHP, so more reasons to use PHP.
Hope this helps you get going with PHP. PHP also has better
date routines than Perl, something Perl should have fixed
years ago.
Maybe Python will emerge as another tool and important to the web,
e-commerce, etc. But it hasn't caught on like PHP. You should
also investigate CURL, which is being used more and more with
PHP.
-DG-
py****@hope.cz wrote:
Hello folks,
I have been programming with Perl then with Python for about 7 years.
But I have heard a lot of praise about PHP but I would like to know
what is so nice with PHP and if it is worth starting to learn PHP.
Cheers,
L.B.
