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**mspiegle** · 10-21-2005, 10:52 PM

I was originally a web guy for a while. I did lots of HTML and some flash. The people I was doing contract work for said I should try out "PHP" because it was the new cool thing to do. They gave me a book and I started working with it (never had experience with a C-style language before). I liked it alot and continued learning on my own and doing a few projects. I later learned MySQL.

Yeah... you can think of PHP as an easier version of C for the internet. Its much easier because you don't have to worry about variable types and memory management.

Alot of people view PHP as "unprofessional". If you look at alot of huge websites, they tend to use things like coldfusion, asp, or perl. I'm not quite sure where it got this connotation from.. but maybe that's because its free and people like to spend money on something backed by a large company. Its lame how many people are still scared of open-source... but whatever.

I would consider PHP and ASP to be on the same level. They individually have their own advantages and disadvantages, but for the most part you can accomplish the same with both. If you were confined to a Windows environment, ASP would be better. If you're confined to the Unix environment, then PHP would be better. Each language was designed to be run with a certain system in mind. You can obviously run either language on either platform - but you lose some functionality.

I am currently a unix sysadmin for a top-tier webhosting company. I primarilly use PHP because its more powerful than bash and allows me to talk directly to our core customer MSSQL database. Its a very versatile language for the web, or on the system. I personally give it my vote and if I had to do everything all over again... i'd still go with PHP. The only other language I would consider learning is probably perl since it is so widely used and is EXCELLENT for working with data (hence its name).

**mspiegle** · 10-21-2005, 10:56 PM

Originally posted by george graves

Why does every web development job I see on line want you to know ASP, perl, blah, blah, blah....list goes on and on....If you knew all of them "with experience" would you command a 100K or so? what up with that?

>>>????

I'd be curious to know this myself... You should call up or email and ask what kinda work will be done.

**RH318is** · 10-21-2005, 11:22 PM

If you're new to database driven web sites you might want to try ColdFusion. I took a 3-day beginner course and have learned and taught myself everything else I know. I'm not a programming professional actually did mostly Network & System Admin. I find ColdFusion to be very powerful and limited by my programming ability. Another advantage of it is that it's probably really well integrated with Flash, Dreamweaver, etc. and you could combine all that in one site using Dreamweaver. I started using CF with version 4.5 (now at 7) and CF Studio 4.5, so I still hard code html & cfml in CF studio 4.52. Anyway, I use CFMX 7 with MS SQL 2000 and it's awesome for making 'active' sites. A couple real nice features of CFMX 7 are flash based forms where you can have tabs without the page reloading, a robust chart feature (you can see a simple chart on the front page of my site www.3dmotiontraining.com) and on the fly pdf file generation. I've just finished a couple on the fly pdf reports and it's very cool (no creating pdfs and uploading them manually).

You can download and use for FREE the developer edition of CFMX 7 and can connect to it from 2 ip address. I've found CrystalTech.com to be a very good hosting co. for CF.

For what it's worth-

**nando** · 10-22-2005, 11:26 AM

I've been programming perl for about 6 years.. it's a pain in the ass. perl programmers are pretty rare, but you do need to know a lot of the other stuff. I don't do ASP, PHP or CF though so I doubt it would get me a job.

**Febi Guibo** · 10-24-2005, 11:00 AM

Hey, just a quick chime-in:

I progressed from C# (school), to perl (first jobs), to PHP (my own shop); I've never looked back. PHP gets some knocks because, with so many people using it, the quality level varies a lot.

This is also not knocking jsp/asp/cf/.cgi et al. The right tool for the job is always the best tool for the job.

But I would encourage you to stick with php; PHP apps have the lowest cost of ownership, and the number of folks/companies using it is *huge* (flip side of the problem above).

Yahoo, for example, is using PHP (not in final production pages, but for all other application development) and a number of other extremely gigantic sites are using it successfully too.

.asp is a solid skill set too, obviously; you can/will always make money with solid .asp/vbscript, and who can ignore M$oft, but in my opinion, php has the most solid 'footing' right now... ('footing' = user base + mind share + solid code base + lowest cost of ownership).

**george graves** · 10-24-2005, 08:26 PM

The right tool for the job is always the best tool for the job

Amen to that....applys to everything.

Thanks guys - one thing I've been struggling with is e-commerce side of things - I researched integrated pay-pal, and like it.

It's not the best... but great for small sites (like I do) - I'm reading up on allowing PHP to act as a middle man between a front end and pay-pal. I think that might be a good way of getting clients to accept pay-pal in a easy to use, secure, seamless user experience.

It's tough getting started in this stuff cause the "web" world is SO huge and ever changing. Guess that why I've been sticking to html - easy, and static.

And unless you work it full time and have time on the side to do constant learning(that I love to do...but the time factor kills it)...your up a creak.

I wish I had a job that someone paid me to learn 75% of the time, and "work" 25% of the time - how nice work that be....

Thanks again for the advice

....

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