PHP program for coding

[ShuckyD]

Well i decided that i would take a look at PHP coding since ive seen so many of my friends doing scripting and other stuff and they all use PHP, they think its the wave of the future. Well i dont think that much but i do wanna see what its all about

Anyway i got a dummies book to PHP5 and i wanted to get anyones opinions on how to start out learning PHP and if there are any good compilers (if thats what you use in PHP) for the code. I want anyones advice who has had some fun with PHP

I think it will be fun to see what it can do, well i have Visual Studio 03 and 05 at my disposal but i dont think M$ provides anything for PHP programming. So what are the benefits of PHP and what can i do with it?

Thanks in advance for anyone who decides to read this post

[vass0922]

1. No compiler for PHP.. its web only
2. You can use a simple code editor like SciTE that has syntax editing for a LOT of different languages, to include PHP.

PHP IS a huge thing these days with good database capabilties

LAMP is becoming the big thing these days overall for database centric websites
Linux
Apache
MySQL
PHP

[VHockey86]

Microsoft + Visual Studio = ASP.NET, not PHP.

As vass said, all you need is a text editor for PHP coding. To run the code you need a computer running a webserver (such as Apache) and then you need to install the PHP library for the webserver, normally called "mod_php" for apache.

[originel]

If you're not a linux user (which you should be ), then you can still install apache, mysql, and php on windows. notepad++ is a good open source code editor for windows.

[vass0922]

Quote:

Originally Posted by originel

If you're not a linux user (which you should be ), then you can still install apache, mysql, and php on windows. notepad++ is a good open source code editor for windows.

interesting
This is the first spinoff of SciTE I've seen
(They're both based on Scintilla)

Will have to check it out.

[ShuckyD]

Heh.. So if i want to really learn some PHP i should install Mandriva or something and run stuff i write from there?

Can i do simple programs like you probably all have seen my posts when i had my programming class in C#? Or is is strictly like a SQL query language type of deal?

[originel]

Quote:

Can i do simple programs like you probably all have seen my posts when i had my programming class in C#? Or is is strictly like a SQL query language type of deal?

It's a turing complete language, although it's pretty much web-only. You could do simple programs in it, although unless there is a specific need for web stuff then you're better off learning c or java. You cannot program stand alone programs in PHP.

Quote:

Heh.. So if i want to really learn some PHP i should install Mandriva or something and run stuff i write from there?

[large_nostril]

If you want to get started with PHP and MySQL and that good stuff, check out XAMPP. It's basically a complete, simple install package containing Apache, PHP, and MySQL (and a bunch of other features if you choose to install them). It's really simple to install, use, and configure. There are versions for Windows and Linux (and Mac and Solaris even). I use it on my WinXP machine (for development) and also run a server with it on a Gentoo box. Just note that it's aimed more for development purposes and not for a production server unless you're gonna spend some time configuring and securing it.

For an editor/IDE, check out PHP Editors. They have a good list of editors (commercial and freeware) along with reviews and ratings.

As far as learning it goes, once you've gotten down the basics (which should all be covered in the book you've got), start checking out other scripts and working through the code. Start with simple scripts and modify them to do different things, it's the way we ALL learned . Hotscripts.com is a great resource for finding scripts and source codes.

[adam-red]

This http://www.php-mysql-tutorial.com/ site provides a walkthrough for installing and configuring PHP, MySQL and Apache for Windows. It also has loads of nice tutorials in PHP and MySQL.
As for a PHP IDE, I use PHP Designer 2006 which is freeware.

[ShuckyD]

Heh, so for standalone projects i should take a look at Java to see what its all about? Since i already know some C