[WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP

[Sheldon Rampton]

Nicholas Knight wrote:

>Months? It takes me a few *hours* to be able to create useful code in a
>new language. A few days and I can embark on significant projects. This
>isn't about difficulty or time (though I'd not be happy about wasting
>the time), it's about not wanting to subject myself to the horror that
>is PHP just to be able to do a couple things with MediaWiki, probably
>never to touch the code again.

Well, it only took *me* a few hours to learn how to create useful 
code in PHP, and my programming skills are strictly hobbyist level. I 
worked through a couple of online tutorials, and that was all I 
needed. PHP is actually a lot like Perl, with somewhat more 
conventional syntax and a little less emphasis on text processing. I 
love the way you can use it to drop code right into the middle of 
HTML. With just a few lines of code you can create an interactive 
form that queries a database and returns a result. To do the same 
thing in Perl, you'd typically need one static HTML page and a 
separate page for the CGI script that processes the form data and 
returns the result. It can be done, but it's more work. Once I 
discovered PHP, I stopped using Perl and haven't looked back.

--Sheldon Rampton