New to PHP

[marsd]

Hi all..
I'm new to PHP but decided that it was worth looking
into.
I've considerable experience with other languages
and web development in general using older methods
(cgi and javascript based solutions).

Can somebody give me an overview of the ways they
use PHP that are simpler/better than using either
cgi or client side(javascript)scripting?
I can see some immediate benefits in my own experiments
but I'm interested in what people are doing with it,
with and without db backends, etc...

Thanks.

 

[sleipnir214]

I came to PHP from many other languages. The last I learned before PHP was perl.

I have to say that I much prefer PHP to perl as a web-programming language. PHP's session management is better, it's object-oriented features are a lot more straightforward, it's variables are a lot easier to deal with, the language is well-organized and intuitively documented, and I don't have to keep track of how to alphabetize punctuation marks to know how to look stuff up. PHP also supports perl-compatible regular expressions in its preg_* family of functions, so I have one of the best features of perl available to me.

Since PHP uses specialized external libraries where necessary, you get good performance. For example, I get better performance with PHP from Linux fetching and displaying MS SQL database data than I do with ASP/VBscript on Win32, even when ASP/VBscript is running on a significantly faster machine. ASP/VBscript uses ODBC to communicate with the database server, but PHP uses native communication libraries. The abstraction of ODBC often causes problems with performance. PHP also tightly supports Oracle, MySQL, PostreSQL, and other database servers.

I've produced graphics on the fly which contained TrueType fonts to display text, using the GD graphics library via PHP's image_* family of functions.

I've used the CURL library (via PHP's curl_* family of functions) to send complex data to foreign websites and parse the return.

I'm really happy with the language.

You picked an interesting time (As in that old curse, "May you live in interesting times&quot to learn PHP. A major new revision of PHP, version 5.0, is due out this year. Most of the changes are to improve memory and performance in its object-oriented functions.

Want the best answers? Ask the best questions:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

TANSTAAFL!!