[ale] asp user learning php?

[James Sumners]

Do you mean ASP or ASP.NET? There is a _big_ difference. I'm going to
assume, since this is 2013, that you mean ASP.NET for the remainder of
this reply.

When you say he wants a design environment like he has with ASP, I
think you mean Visual Studio. To understand this reply you must have
some knowledge of how web development, and specifically web
development, is done in that environment. ASP.NET shoehorns
traditional application development into a web development, erm,
platform. This _does not_ work. With ASP.NET your programming consists
of "controls" and "view states" and all sorts of garbage that does not
translate to any web development specific environment, e.g. PHP.

So, the person in question is used to a sort of Visual Basic style of
web development where he drags something that represents a button to a
visual representation of the page being "designed." He then adds some
code according to how that button is expecting it.

You don't do anything like that in PHP, and I have never seen and IDE
that attempts to make it so.

On the other hand, if he is looking for something that does code
completion _and_ intellisense type stuff, then I'd probably recommend
the JetBrains product PHPStorm[1]. I haven't ever used it myself, but
their other editors are very well done. You could also investigate
NetBeans or *shudder* Eclipse. Personally, I prefer Sublime Text 2,
but he doesn't want "just a text editor."

As for learning PHP, the tutorial on php.net is great. The best thing
about PHP is the documentation. Start with the stuff on php.net and if
that isn't enough then maybe pick up an O'Reilly book.

On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 8:19 AM, Lightner, Jeff <JLightner at water.com> wrote:
> I have a friend that does web design using asp that wants to start going the
> open source route.
>
>
>
> He specifically asked me about learning php and I have loaned him an
> O’Reilly book that talks about php, MySQL and one other thing as well as my
> Apache book.   I had those but really don’t do web design myself.
>
>
>
> Are there any good recommendations for what to look at to get up to speed on
> php if one is used to asp?
>
>
>
> Specifically he’d asked me if there is a design environment like that for
> asp so he doesn’t have to do everything in text editors.   Since I’m not
> familiar with asp I’m not sure what environment he is speaking of but
> thought someone on this list might.
>
>
>
> I’m not asking for someone to Google for this – I’m asking people that know
> both ways of doing things what resources they’d recommend.



-- 
James Sumners
http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
CH:D 59