Visit the Official PHP Website
PHP Programming
By James N Hitz
I already know and use Perl. Do I really need PHP?
As indicated in a past issue of Intranet Design Magazine [http://idm.internet.com]...
"...one has to weigh many factors in choosing a development path: past experience, platforms, time-to-market, and so forth... In truth, PHP like any language offers several advantages and also possesses several disadvantages to consider."
The magazine outlines PHP's strengths...
"... [PHP has a] modest learning curve, [is] free and [in] open development, [supports] native database connectivity, stability, and availability for a variety of platforms.... PHP's primary strength is in rapid development of dynamic web pages. Developers without heavy programming experience can leverage PHP to complete tasks otherwise cryptic or obtuse in altnerative languages, such as pulling records from a database and inserting them into an HTML table. The architecture of the PHP language is simple but powerful, and includes an extremely wide variety of functions suited for many tasks, both traditional data processing tasks and more web-oriented functions as well."
...and weaknesses...
"... one could argue that PHP remains an immature language, without the architectural elegance or extensibility of Perl, for instance. Whereas some developers find embedded scripting, where program code is often mixed together with HTML structure, empowering, other developers find this approach disorganized and bug-prone, preferring separate development environments for each web component. Developers with experience in Perl and especially mod_perl environments may find little reason to spend time with PHP, and this may be entirely justifiable...."
Need I say more? The choice is yours! I'll teach you PHP anyway. Other than an adjusted atttitude, what else do you need?... (I have so many dots on this page it is making me peck... peck... like OOOps :)>