Asp, Php, Cfm!

buddy

Its nearly time for me to move into the dynamic, scipting language area - I've made small attempts before but recognise now that this is an area where my talents are lacking.

How did you learn these languages? Whats the best method - certain books, sites etc - what tools would I need?

I know of www.webmonkey.com and find them good but am looking for alternatives - I do learn well from books.

Ph3n0m

I taught myself PHP using 2 books and several tutorial websites

I will post the name of the books when I get home

but the sites I used were mostly

www.phpbuilder.com - great forum and snippets area

Took me about 2 weeks to get into the serious stuff and its still going strong

Serbian

Hey,

The good thing about scripting languages is that they are pretty easy to learn, and you can start getting pretty good results pretty early.

I started PHP a couple of years ago when I designed a webmail client for my final year project in college. I learnt the language just by doing a couple of simple tutorials on www.devshed.com and then by visiting the forums there found at forums.devshed.com. I was coming from a Java background, and the syntax was inhereted from the java language, although the code itself is very different, but it still made it a little easier for me. The PHP manual [found at www.php.net] also helped a lot, it is fully searchable and has good descriptions of what the funtions actually do.

I learnt ASP when I started my job a year ago. None of the servers that we had sites hosted on had PHP support, so when I wanted to script anything I didn't really have a choice. I started learning by doing a tutorial on some site, but I learnt about the language mostly from designing stored procedures in Transact SQL on SQL Server! If you look at the language reference you can see that there really aren't many functions to know in ASP, so I presonally think it's easier to learn than PHP.

As for Cold Fusion. Well, I'm not a proficient CF programmer, but I have toyed with the language a little. It is quite simple as the tags look like HTML, but the problem with that is it makes it quite different to any programming language you are likely to have used so it can be a little confusing at the start. I don't know how easy or difficult it is to create nice applications with since I have never actually done it, but I hear that it is a fairly user friendly language.

If you are looking for help learning scripting languages, I think Forums are more use than tutorials ever could be. Basically, give yourself a project to do and ask questions when you come to bits that you can't figure out. I think that's the best way to learn anything, by trial and error. There is also www.hotscripts.com that has an archive of scripts people have written in various languages. I like Webmonkey, devshed.com and forums.devshed.com.

The Corinthian

There are two important principles that you need to understand before you learn server-side scripting:

1. It’s Programming. By this I mean, it’s not something you can do competently with a WYSIWYG, it’s not HTML, it’s good old-fashioned programming. So if you don’t get out of the mindset of a Web designer (using free scripts and cutting ‘n pasting the rest), you’ll never get beyond beginners level. Use Notepad or something equally basic, and avoid anything with wizards.
2. Understand the Server-Client Model. It’s actually scary how many Web professionals don’t understand this, given it’s the most fundamental paradigm to the internet and particularly important to a Server-side developer. Again, if you don’t ‘get’ this, you won’t go far.

Now, assuming you have the two perpetuates covered:

• ASP. ASP 101 has an excellent code sample section that allows one to learn individual functions and objects in ASP and ASP.Net, one by one. This workshop should also help you get started. Other sites of interest include:
  www.4guysfromrolla.com
  www.15seconds.com
• PHP. PHP.net is the source for all things PHP related. As with ASP above there is a similar workshop available to help you get started. Other sites of interest include:
  www.phpbuilder.com
  http://www.onlamp.com/php/
• Cold Fusion. Hmmm... Sorry, can’t help you. Never took an interest in CF.

Finally, as for which one to go for, I suggest you do a search on previous threads on this issue as it’s been debated to death.

dynamic.ie

I learnt asp from using dreamweaver and the split view so I could see how it was all done. I also used the forums and tutorials on www.dmxzone.com and built up a nice little knowledgebase in my head.

Another great site for asp was www.sloppycode.net. After I had learned from doing, I got the books to pick up stuff I missed and as a reference. The www.wrox.com books are pretty good.

You may want to check out www.sitepoint.com. The books and stuff are great.

Dave

buddy

Thanks guys - I'll be bookmarking these sites - Sitepoint looks great and I like the way they take Paypal - I have some money in a paypal a/c going to waste