> Unfortunately I get paid peanuts to learn something I'm not really interested in. It's a shame because I usually love my job. I suppose it's a useful skill to have though and may earn me a bit of money in the long run.
If you really feel like this, I doubt whether you'll get into it. If you lack the enthusiasm to start, I don't fancy your chances once you hit a wall - and you will - quite often when you begin. If you don't develop your skills, you won't, as you state, start earning more than peanuts.
Anyway, pHp is probably one of the easiest languages to pick up (and the easiest with which to get into bad habits). Buy some books, tune into decent sites like w3schools (although none are perfect) and practice. All you need to start is a decent free text editor, like Notepad++ (Windows). I've heard TextWrangler for Mac is pretty good. Install a tidy php package like XAMPP ( http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-macosx.html ) and an FTP client ( http://filezilla-project.org/download.php ) for uploading to a remote site. Then you're pretty much good to go.
diafol
Rhod Gilbert Fan (ardav)
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@TWBB - yes you can run php etc from your computer. That's the whole point in installing it! :)
diafol
Rhod Gilbert Fan (ardav)
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There are quite a number of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) development systems. You can see a list at:
_FileWriteToLine($output_file, $file_line, $file_line_data) $file_line = $file_line + 1
The two you mention are somewhat lesser known (and not in the list). It seems that Sokkit is no longer supported. PHP Triad seems to be a popular download on CNET. Suggest that you look at (info on) some of the others before making a decision. Xampp and maybe some of the others are available for the Mac.
Depending on how much relevant programming experience you have, it's going to take some, or possibly a lot of work and time to become any good with PHP. You can probably do some simple stuff fairly quickly but to do anything more complex (which may be what your boss is hoping for) you will need to spend some time at it. If you don't already have a pretty good knowledge of html and css you'll be needing those as well, you'll probably need to get at least a basic knowledge of a database (probably MySQL) and you'll need at least some knowledge of Javascript / Ajax (or a package like JQuery) if you are aiming to develop really dynamic sites.
If you are starting off with negative feelings, then I think there will be a lot more of that to come unless you can get to enjoy it. If you aren't doing it because you like it, then you'll never be really good at it either. You might want to spend some time understanding what your boss is looking for and then see if it can be satisfied with an open-source or commercial package. There are many good PHP packages out there and many of them are free. Without much programming knowledge, you can learn to install and manage these pre-built solutions much quicker than you can learn how to build something from scratch.
chrishea
Nearly a Posting Virtuoso
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I think we're confusing the posters here. The OP wasn't fussed on the idea, TWBB seems like an enthusiast!
diafol
Rhod Gilbert Fan (ardav)
7,765 posts since Oct 2006
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chrishea
Nearly a Posting Virtuoso
1,427 posts since Sep 2008
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