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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | A note for Perl jocks |
| If you can't install all the Perl modules you want (say on a $12.99/month commercial host), give PHP a try. It has weaknesses and strengths vis-A -vis Perl, but you can use both! They work well together, and with XHTML, CSS, and MySQL. Who says you have to choose one over the other?
After scouring the web for tutorials and sample code, I think this book is the quickest way to get up to speed. It is concise with excellent code samples, warnings of pitfalls, and techniques for thwarting adversaries (hackers). It is straightforward without annoying cuteness or humor. PHP code lives entirely within a web page. Some advantages: 1. You don't have to make print statements for all the HTML on the page; the PHP code can be inserts in the HTML. 2. Flow control. A page can include its own associated programming logic for easier maintenance and an uncluttered webroot directory. A form page can recursively call itself, instead of a separate script, for processing, and can call other pages. 3. It's embarrassingly *EASY* to learn with this book! Some instructions just changed names (split is "explode," next is "continue") but other instructions are new and super-handy for the web! Sessions and cookie-handling are built in to the language (chapter 8). Scope rules and data structures are different; you can't shift, pop, or test for undef, but you get two-dimensional arrays. If you go this route I guarantee you will have read this entire book, plus some of the online PHP manual, by the time your site is done. This book is not comprehensive but selects an excellent breadth of features. One typo is unforgivable, and for that I unapologetically deduct a star: the very first database example in Chapter 1 shows $db->numrows() without the parentheses, which does not work. I spent two days trying to figure out what was wrong. Very confusing since the old way of doing it (before PHP's PEAR extensions) was mysql_num_rows <--without parentheses. TIP: Do NOT assume that your host is on PHP 5! Though mine advertises 5, they put you on 4 unless you ask for 5. This one-line program will tell you which version you're on: TIP #2: Blank web page got you down? You can see the syntax error by running it from a command line, like this: php5 mypage.php |
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