[ale] asp user learning php?

Lightner, Jeff JLightner at water.com
Fri Mar 8 13:31:30 EST 2013


Thanks.





-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of James Sumners
Sent: Friday, March 08, 2013 1:21 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] asp user learning php?

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

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