well, guys.. i dont know much of shit on PHP even though i've been trying forever. i used to catch on to things really fast, but i guess my mind is always too busy now days, or something.

anyway, i have two questions..

1) does anyone have any tips on the best way to learn new languages.. i know that PHP is considered to be the easiest, so I'm really sucking it up here to ask this question and hope noone writes me off as a complete dumbass. however, i just can seem to figure out a good way to learn it.. i look through my books, and always just like jump around and never really learn anything.

2) also, i want to make a link on a page change a certain peice of text on the same page. i don't want it to load another page, or stop any processes on that page from running, just change one short bit of text. how would i go about this in PHP? i don't want the code written for me.. just someone to explain it to me like they're speaking to a dumbass .

i might as well reveal my true lurker form. westheretardedhuman

1) Buy a book on the subject.
2) Check out the php.net manual

Cheers Sam

smkone.. backoff him.. please..

please dont discuss issues that regard AIM or what not on here..


Wes... IF you can wait, i'll help you out tomorrow (i have 1exam and work) so i'll find some time.

and the weekend ..

i've got a book on the subject. and i guess you guys aren't very newbie friendly here.. i guess i'll just kindly step back into the shadows.

my bad, i'm terribly sorry, and later.

thanks for the peace, quik.

i've got to get on a plane at 5:00 tomorrow for that conference in atlanta.. i'll be there till sunday night.

oh yeah.. #)@*&@&$

I'm not sure what you mean by changing one piece of text without stopping a process but you can do this in javascript by placing the text in a text box and using the onclick() event handler.

If you want to do something like this in PHP what I would reccomend is using the link with PHP_SELF and setting some variables (flags) to tell you dynamically what pieces of the page were running.

you can also use an href='?flag1=1&flag2=1&flag3=0&flag4=1'

this will reload the same page, the flag's can be set with variables and you can use if statements to decide which piece of code to run. For instance:
if ($flag2 == 1){
include this....
} else {
include this...
}

hope this helps,
Hoopster

as far as learning new languages, everyone is different but this is what usually works for me:

Read the first third of the book or so, doing all the exercises as you go. After the first third of the book you have the general idea of how the language works, and the basics. Then just start making up small projects you can do with it (an email form, or a simple guestbook, things like that) and try it. The best way to learn is to just do it, even if it takes days to figure out something simple. Use the book as a reference. And don't be afraid to ask questions here; there are tons of people around willing to help.

If you're looking for an easier language to start with, try ASP. I find it to be much more intuitive than many other ones. :)

Oh, and for tutorials, check out www.webmonkey.com and www.wdvl.com. They both have great tutorials that will walk you through the basics of almost any language you could want.

hrmm...

Ive read a third of an ASP book, and a third of a PHP book..
I would say PHP is by far easier to learn.

Im sure Chris and many others will agree with that.

The only backend language I can say is even easier then both, is coldfusion. But it isn't supported by many servers, and isnt very wide ranged with its language

well I haven't tried PHP so you may be right.

:)

I converted a lot of .cfm stuff to .asp while I worked at Intel. I think the reasoning was that ASP was less expensive (if your on IIS servers you basically have it supported) where as coldfusion has an extra cost and isn't quite as robust a development environment.

From a commercial standpoint cold fusion skill is also less common and less valuable in the marketplace. Over the long haul it seems unlikely that cold fusion will last against the might of MS and the low/no cost of Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL.

If you want to eventually join corporate america knowing .asp will go a long way towards getting a job a "big time company" but the open source products are catching on with big corporations and have caught upto MS in just a couple years. Apache is the most used server on the web and as such it helps PHP and MySQL have a huge reach.

Performance wise it's amazing how fast, reliable and robust PHP/MySQL is. Lots of benchmark sites list it as faster than anything else for a lot of purposes.

I have used all three and PHP is easier than the other two to learn and use. ASP is very easy to learn if you can write VB and HTML but PHP has a speed advantage because of the way it is called. The convenience of form fields autromgically becoming variables in a PHP document makes it easy to use.

Here is a little form I made a while back when I was first getting into PHP.
amortization

No DB, but great dynamic page generation and calculation possibilities. You also can build dynamic images with it which is very cool for charts and graphs.

I highly reccomend PHP for newbies and programmers alike and I wouldn't be surprised if PHP caught ASP as a sought after skill with corporate america. never discount MS though, .NET seems pretty formidable from my limited understanding.

Hoopster

Not to mention that PHP is PHP. Asp is stuff written in VB or Javascript, then you have ASP C# .Net and ASP .NET. WAYYYY too many letter for me.

And if your korean, you won't get Nimda.