Preserved Topic: CGI & Perl OR PHP??

I'm going to learn a language so I can make websites with accounts, and logins and stores stuff info on the server. What language should I Start With?? or which one is best?

PHP is very popular at the moment and backed up with a huge open source society, but JSP and PERL and . . . something new that might come in the near future are cool too. I would say, just pick one (PHP for example) and stick with it for a while. That will help you to grasp programming concepts, which you can apply later in any programming language.

Sasha »

What he sais.

When you know one APL style language, you can quickly adapt to all of them.
PHP is nice, and a bit more appropriate than perl to the whole 'basic dynamic website' thing.
Perl is more powerful, but hard for beginners, because 'there is more than one way to do it [or anything]' with it.

so long,

Tyberius Prime

well i use ASP and i like it its easy and VERY powerful

visite my Blackbrain

well, asp.net might not be half bad,
but regular asp is a bit unlike everything else... meaning it won't help you in your quest later on.
Also, in general and my experience, good ASP hosting is more expensive than good PHP hosting.

Plus, it seems to be an excuse to drop all, you know, like, punctuation from your sencence

so long,

Tyberius Prime

ASP in and of itself isn't horrible. The fact that it's generally run on IIS however means it's gonna have security issues, also most of the time you won't get a choice between ASP and PHP or Perl, while these can all be platform independent generally there not so your choices will be limited by your server platform.

I'm personally partial to PHP for web applications though I'm starting to learn JSP for use in an application server context. However generally for my personal site I'm not going to have the ability to use this. I also use perl/mod_perl for work these days and have grown to really love it though I use it much more for writing automated server scripts, not necessarily web page generation.

Finally CGI isn't actually a language. It's the "Common Gateway Interface" that allows programs to use server side scripts. 90% of the time these days it really means perl though in the old days C and C++ could be used (though generally using a compiled binary for something like cgi adds development overhead with relatively little gain to a scripting language like perl)



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.

ok asp only runs onan iis and it is mor expencife but FAR more easy to learn ...and learning Visual basic after it is very easy to ..and once learned Visual Basic al the other languages become mor or less easy to learn ..i think to start with it is one of the best

visite my Blackbrain

Far easier to learn than what?
While perl can be complex it's basics are not that bad. Even that being said though PHP is the easiest server side language I've ever seen to work with.



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.

quote:

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..and once learned Visual Basic al the other languages become mor or less easy to learn

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Actually, I started programming in Basic when I was a child and I've spent many years try to undo what Basic teaches you...not to mention being tied to one platform..

you want to learn... Perl or C... I hear Python is awsome for beginers..

Hop on over to http://www.activestate.com and DL the interpreters for Perl, Python, or whatever you choose... but PLEASE stay away from Basic and ASP...


Code - CGI - links - DHTML - Javascript - Perl - programming - Magic - http://www.twistedport.com
ICQ: 67751342

Ok, let me preface this by saying I am in no way shape or form a prgrammer.

That said, I have been playing with PHP quite A bit lately, and have been able to do some pretty cool things for the web without all that much difficulty.

Having looked into other languages mentioned here before settling on PHP, I can say that PHP has been by far the easiest for me to grasp - and from what I can see suffers very little on the 'power' end of things.

Plus it has absolutely nothing to do with microsoft, which is always a plus.

we've had this topic before. PHP is known as the perl killer because of it's scalability and it was made specifically to be a server side scripting language for the web. Perl is a language that was created to be able to run through alot of text files. Unix administrators use this language to get around. The problem is CGI (perl use for the web) is taxing on the server in that it runs a seperate process every time it is called. Personally I'm learning two: PHP and Coldfusion. Heres a great article titled which server-side language is for you? It tells the advantages and disadvantages of all the ss scripting languages. Hope that helps.

I'll second what DL said. Granted, I have managed to shoot myself in the foot a few times (yet, it did require effort), but I'm liking PHP so far. I've been able to do everything I wanted to do. Granted, I may not have extremely high expectations, but it hasn't disappointed me yet.

Hi,
Id recommend you use php. I started learning php just the other day and im enjoying the experience. Perl and CGI have many issues that I found too complex to handle (in the past)
A good book to start off with (in my experience) is php and mysql web developement by luke welling and laura thomson. best of luck with your persuits.

mavanipk

Chalk another one up for PHP from the non-programmers side of the fence.

Well actually, I have been doing quite a lot of programming lately but I still don't consider myself a programmer. It's just something I've fallen into through the need to add more functionality to the work I do.

Personally, I prefer any language that uses a C style syntax. Simply because once you learn it it's easier to move from one to the other, PHP, Perl, Java, C, Javascript, Actionscript etc...

Recently I've been doing a lot of Lingo scripting which is an event driven language that was once based on basic which has grown into some bastard version of god knows what since they've tried to work OO concepts into it. It doesn't really make that much sense, it's often hard to keep the code clean and it's not all that easy to understand or read. It just feels dirty compared to C style languages.

Maybe that's because I started started out learning how to program in a C like language but from what I've seen, basic style languages are on the decline. Visual basic and ASP seem to be about the only ones that are still in widespread use.

-- my 2c

the cs-graduate-wannabe in me cringes, when I hear someone talking about 'c style languages'. The language family is called APL guys.