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With more and more applications being driven to the World Wide Web, server-side scripting languages like PHP make sense. In a server-side scripting language, all of the processing takes place on the server. This means that the developer can create a fully scalable application at the source and have full control over the environment. The user, on the client side, enters data and clicks a button. This sends a request to the server with the form data embedded in the request. The server then takes this request, passes it on to the PHP translator that evaluates and processes the information, then returns simple HTML back to the client.

PHP uses a combination of HTML, scripts and tags to create code that is easy to structure and read. Anyone with knowledge of HTML and a scripting language such as Javascript or VBScript will be up and running in no time. And there is no shortage of places to learn PHP on the Web.

If you need a fast, open-source, easy to learn scripting language for your website, PHP is the way to go.

Equipping an office with the standard Windows applications is an expensive activity. Some Microsoft applications make you purchase the software itself and then pay additional licensing fees when you connect your Microsoft client computer to a Microsoft server computer.

Damn Small Linux applications are free. Some of them are included with the initial download while others have to be downloaded and installed subsequently. There are several reasons for this seemingly intricate procedure. Not everybody wants to use the same applications. Furthermore, the very strict selection of the applications in its base package helps the Damn Small Linux distribution to respect the hard to believe 50 Megabyte limit. Once you have installed Damn Small Linux you can download Open Source (free) versions of Office and run them under Linux. Please note that you can download and run these programs under Microsoft Windows as well.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Well Jack doesn’t have to worry if he’s running Damn Small Linux. It comes with lots of free games. Somehow we have the impresssion that you will not need any tutorials to get the games running.

Some Linux applications are not only free but are actually superior when compared to the corresponding Windows applications. For example, have you ever heard of an e-mail client called Sylpheed? This application is part of the basic Damn Small Linux distribution. It has several advantages over those extremely popular (perhaps we should say unpopular) Microsoft e-mail offerings, Outlook and Outlook Express. Sylpheed handles spam much better than do its Windows counterparts. And Sypheed allows you to process threads of e-mail messages. For example, you correspond with several people about wholesale wine purchases. Sypheed makes it easy to process those messages while ignoring unrelated ones.

Since we’re talking about email, what about it’s cousin the Internet? That will be the subject of our next article in this series.

There are many fairly technical reasons for moving to MySQL5. In many cases the absence of just one of the technical features discussed in this article would be reason enough for people to move from the previous version despite its many features and advantages. Given all these features MySQL5 is now in the database management big leagues. This product should be considered for any database management project no matter how large or sophisticated. When we say large databases we mean it. MySQL is now used in some commercial applications that involve more than 20 billion rows of data. Sabre Holdings uses it to help run the world’s largest on-line airline reservation system.

Among the technical database features that are considered an integral part of sophisticated database management solutions are stored procedures, triggers, named-updateable views, server-side cursors, type enhancements, standards-compliant metadata (INFORMATION_SCHEMA), XA-style distributed transactions, and hot backups. (This is not the place to explain these functions, don’t worry if you don’t know what they mean until you are ready to start using them.) And if that sounds like a lot to learn, well it is. But if you need any or all of this functionality you will swear by MySQL5. And swear at MySQL4. If need these features don’t look for workarounds, download MySQL5.

MySQL5 can run on old computers. For example, I downloaded MySQL5, copied it to a USB pen drive and then copied the files, less than 90 Megabytes, into a Pentium computer purchased new in way back in August 1999. The only reason I couldn’t run it under Windows 98 because the system didn’t recognize my USB drive. But I easily ran it under Windows 2000 on this computer, which had an Internet browser but no live Internet connection. Moral of the story: You can do MySQL5 even on outdated computers. Needless to say, you can’t test your huge, sophisticated databases on such computers. But you can use them to begin learning the ins and outs of this important language.

When would a Web Developer use PHP?

Initially websites were developed solely in HTML. HTML is the acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. Having all the content written in HTML meant that all the content for the website resides on the actual HTML pages. So for example if your company had a 1000 products you would create a separate HTML Web page for each product. This sort of website is sometimes also referred to as a static website.

The major problem with this scenario is that the design and the content reside in the same place so, for example, if you wanted to update all the product prices you would need to edit and update all 1000 Web pages. Not only was this very time consuming but allowing non-Web designers access to the HTML could potentially have very serious consequences if the HTML code was compromised in any way.

The solution was to create a database driven website where all the content resides in an external database. You would then only need to create one product page and depending which parameters were passed from the database, the website would display only the relevant product/s. Obviously this creates a much more controlled environment and a simple task like changing product prices could be achieved in seconds.

As HTML is a static language, it can not communicate directly with a database and therefore Web developers use a programming language such as PHP to feed information to and from the Database. Other benefits of using database driven websites include accumulating information from your users via HTML form submission (new client enquires, mailing lists etc), login authentication (for security purposes), e-commerce (buying and selling goods and services), and managing large volumes of data and more.

MySQL is the World’s most popular database, which over a 100 million copies of it downloaded and distributed. MySQL with its superior speed, reliability, and ease of use is the preferred database used by PHP developers.

PHP and MySQL are a powerful team of tools for any Web Developer.

It took me months to figure out php and MySQL enough to build real, quality, Websites that were “good enough”.

Eventually I figured out the easiest way to learn. It took me MONTHS to figure it out… but I did.

So what does it take to learn a Programming Language such as PHP?

“Doing” is what it takes. 90% of the people who try to take on such a task end up feeling “dumb” or “slow”. This usually is NOT the case. I’ve found that, like myself, most people try to learn PHP from reading and going through code to “understand” what it means.

I was the same way until I was told “just do it”. My mentor must have been the most patient man on the face of this earth – because I was constantly telling him I could not do it. But he kept on me telling me the same line I’m telling you: “just do it”.

What does this mean? It means trying to create your very own scripts, whether small or of decent size. Start out with printing out the date to the browser. Continue with Loops. Create scripts that create mathematical equations. Print out your name, last name, etc.

Once you figure out the basics, make sure you continue to learn by doing! You will never be able to take your skills to the next level just by reading.

I also stress to other newbies that they need to learn by watching as well. Writing code can become quite a task and it’s better to see someone else do that, if possible (which it is by watching videos).

It’s quite easy to get caught up in bad practices while writing code if you do not follow good programming standards. Sloppy (spaghetti) code seems to be the evil of the programming world that occurs from newbies who read online tutorials by so called “programmers”. Most of these “programmers” are NOT what they claim to be. So be careful of whom you choose to learn from.

PHP and MySQL (database) go together like peanut butter and jelly. I cannot tell you how important it is to learn these two languages together. MySQL may not be the “best” Database in the world but it is very easy to learn and very capable of building large scale applications.

So remember: if you’re not “doing”, you’re not learning. Start learning PHP basics in solidperformingcontractors.com and make sure you’re following along and trying to code your own small scripts when starting out. I know, I know… it LOOKS like it’s too hard. It’s not. This is not something you’re going to learn overnight, but it’s quite possible that you can learn enough to do what you need to do in just a matter of weeks!