Re: (OT) PHP Learning experiences

[johnny_carlos]

The good news is PHP looks a lot like Perl, the bad news is PHP looks a lot like Perl.

It's a snap to learn if you know Perl. You won't even need to read any books or anything, you can work with it right now. I do find it annoying that they're so similar you start to get things messed up in your head. Things start blending and you can get confused. The major pitfal is the lack of "use strict". (judging from a lot of questions asked here on PM people aren't using strict, but anyways...)

I don't hang out anywhere for PHP, you don't really need to. You'll find everything you need by Google it when you need it. Everything will be on php.net, and anything else on stackoverflow.

As much as I love Perl and get annoyed with PHP, after working with it a while I do to admit it PHP has some nice features that make basic web development pretty quick. Having the webserver keep track of session data is really nice, and it plays well with mysql.

[aartist]

Thank you all. PHP is not too difficult. I am able to pickup it up relatively easily. I found PHP Exercises very helpful for beginning. I will see how it goes.

[aaron_baugher]

PHP isn't difficult in the sense that it makes you think hard, like a more terse language like Lisp or something lower-level like assembler. It's difficult in the sense of being annoying and causing extra work, like when you have to look up a function you can't remember because there are way too many and no consistent naming convention. Or when you forget that you have to quote the key in a hash, like $hash['key'] -- except when you don't, like when it's being interpolated in a string between double quotes. Or when you wish you could use Perl's natural-sounding backwards syntax, like next unless $count;

Unpleasant and time-consuming, but not really difficult. If you're capable of programming in Perl, you're certainly capable of using PHP. It has C-style syntax, and it even borrowed Perl's regular expressions (although not every feature of them), so many things will be familiar. Just don't expect it to be as flexible or fun to write in.