Re: How to get an unix programmer started on web programming?

On 2005-08-31, Volker Hetzer <volker.hetzer@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Now, I can do oracle no problem but I'm pretty wet behind the ears about
> everything else.
> What books could you recommend to me so that I can learn:
> - what all this apache stuff is about, the mod_*

You don't really need to know a whole lot about apache or mod_* until
you start doing really advanced stuff. PHP will get you very far on
itself.

> - what html or xml looks like, what a css and a dtd is and what I need
> it for

HTML/CSS is of course imperative. XML may be depending on your
application. IMHO XML is mostly suited for getting disparate systems to
talk to eachother and usually not very interesting internally in a
system.

> - session management

Should be explained in any PHP book.

> - login through active directory

AFAIK AD is just LDAP with some M$ stuff on top. I'm not aware of any
PHP to AD bindings, but you can use LDAP from PHP.

> I've thrown my eyes on the php5 and mysql bible (ok it's not oracle but the
> mysql part is 150 out of 1000 pages and the rest looks good from the table
> of contents).

You might want to checkout this review on slashdot:

http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/16/0434205&tid=169&tid=6

It looks quite interesting to me but I haven't read the book so I cannot
recommend it personally. Beware of the million and one PHP+MySQL
introduction books, most of them will teach you some bad habbits and
most likely be a whole lot more confusing than needed. That's what my
impression is from people starting out with PHP anyways. And as you know
programming you'll probably find the introduction books below your
level.

You should also checkout the fantastic online manual of PHP on the
official PHP website - there's also a tutorial on PHP which will get you
started with it.

Know that the language itself is quite easy compared to C/C++ and also
it resembles C quite a bit, so you'll most likely find yourself at home
rather quickly.

Enough of the rambling, welcome to a world without pointers, enjoy! ;-)

--
Cheers,
- Jacob Atzen
.

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