Re: FN-FORUM: Courses on dynamic website creation

date posted 26th September 2005 17:23

O'Reilly's 'Creating Web Applications with MySQL and PHP' was always a
good starting point. It covered stuff that you need to know, such as
database theory (eg normal forms, cardinality etc), language constructs
(eg for-next loops, oo design techniques etc) irrespective of what you
end up building your applications in. Learn these techniques (avoding
vendor-specific lock in) and you'll then be able to switch between most
procedural languages (eg PHP, C#, Perl, Java) and database servers
(MySQL, SQL Server, Postgres, Oracle)

The I reason I say that the O'Reilly book 'was' a good starting point is
that it was written a few years ago for PHP4, however there is a more
recent edition now, but I've not read it:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/webdbapps2/index.html?CMP=ILL-4GV796923290

Download and install xampp (http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html)
for free and you'll get a secure (ie SSL) Apache web server, Perl, PHP
languages, MySQL and SQLite database servers, libraries for creating
dynamic images and flash animations and a whole host of others.
Available for Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS/X.


Hope this helps,

Andrew Larcombe
[EMAIL REMOVED]