Thu, 05 Aug 1999 17:12:00 +0000

For UNIX, you will need PHP. Though ASP works on UNIX, it doesn't work nearly as well as on NT or with as much functionality.

Learning materials are scarce for PHP because it is a fairly new language. Most of the tutorials that are on the Internet actually involve the use of mySQL databases but you should be able to understand which is which - and they are great PHP tutorials. A couple sites to check out are:

http://www.php.net - The official PHP site.

http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/PHP/ - Several PHP tutorials.

http://www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/backend/?tw=backend - they have a couple PHP tutorials.

As for books, I know there is now at least one for sale for about US$30... I did a search for "PHP" at http://www.amazon.com and got four queries. One was irrelevant to PHP and the other three were books. Two are not yet published but the third is.

Compared to HTML, this language is just as easy to learn. I learned the basics and was programming our site in it in about three days. It isn't like HTML but it is as easy to learn. It is not tag related, obviously.

Compared to JavaScript, I am not sure. I haven't done much JavaScript programming but PHP is a lot more like JavaScript than it is HTML. If you know JavaScript, you should catch on really quickly.

Compared to perl, it is so much easier!

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