[thelist] [fwd] Perl, PHP, ASP???

[deke]

On 18 May 2001, at 22:50, Lawrence Carriere posted a message which said:

> What would be a good thing for
> a person who eventually wants to become a web developer to learn?  As I
> said, html is my expertise and it ends there.  I've noticed in my job
> searching that PHP, MySQL, Perl and Javascript come up a lot in the
> "Required Experience" area of job postings but which one would be a good
> start for someone who really knows nothing of any of these?  I need
> something that will be a good investment of my time and effort.

Perl is going to give you the best single return on the investment of
your time and effort because it's useful *off* the web as well as on. I
am constantly building "throwaway" scripts in Perl that make a job
easier - or even possible. That's what Perl was originally invented for.

Learning MySQL is probably going to be useful for a long time, as 
long as you are focusing on learning SQL, rather than on the MySQL
implementation. SQL has been around for a long time, and there is
no obvious replacement for it in sight.

PHP makes it a lot easier to do things that otherwise would require
Perl.  The problem with learning PHP is that it is a moving target.
Learning *anything* is valuable. I learned a lot in high school Latin
in the 1960s that has proven valuable to me in years since, even
though I've never met a Lat. Understanding the structure of the 
language has made me a better programmer. Learning PHP will 
give you things that will make it easier to learn whatever replaces 
PHP in a couple of years, which might be called PHP19 or might
be called something else entirely. It's very unlikely that PHP is
going to stand still.

<asbestos>
JavaScript/Jscript/VBscript/ECMAscript has a couple of problems,
one being a lack of standardization, and the other being fundamental
unreliability because users can and do turn it off. If there are two
ways to solve a problem, solving it server-side is going to work 
*much* better than solving it client-side, because you have more
control. Unfortunately, there are problems that really ought to be 
solved client side.
</asbestos>

Having *answered* your question, perhaps it's important to *question*
the question. There are probably few on this list who have been able
to separate those technologies from each other. In building websites,
we've picked up a little here, a little there. It sounds like Don Quixote,
jumping on his horse and riding off in all directions at once - but it
takes a great diversity of skills to be a good webmaster; being great
in one technology and terrible in all others is not nearly so desirable 
as being passing good in all of them.  

deke








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