Turning to the dark side?

[Vitoc]

So I was in a bookstore last night with the gf last night and was trying to see if I could find any books on LINQ, a new addition to the upcoming Visual Studio, or Orcas, the new Visual Studio that's coming out soon.  Well, I didn't find any books on those topics, but I did pick up a book on PHP and MySQL.  Fast forward a couple hours, I'm on page 130+, and I feel I already have a decent working knowledge of PHP.  I'm going to be tackling the MySQL aspect of PHP over the next week or so, but I'm reasonably sure 90% of the concepts will carry over from my SQL Server knowledge; it's really just a matter of learning PHPs syntax to talk with the database server.

Ok, so maybe I'm not turning to the darkside so much as just picking up a new language.  I plan on doing some work with these forums by tying them into our running realm, and of course, it never hurts to add another language to the ol' resume.

If you don't care much about programming talk, don't read the rest of this. ;)

As for this book, called "The PHP and MySQL Bible" I laugh when I read the author's comparisons to ASP because he's got an obvious bias against Microsoft technologies.  He touts PHP over legacy ASP all day long, but has yet to mention the words .NET or C# which have been around since what, 2002?  When talking about issues that arise from PHPs relaxed type restrictions, he literally says they are "features" rather than "bugs."  I cringe when I read about the types of "features" that can occur during runtime, and half the time PHP will just let the "feature" happen, without letting you know it's trying to compensate for something you've obviously overlooked.  They call it "forgiving" which is the understatement of the year, because I liken it to a parent being "forgiving" enough to let a toddler play in the middle of a busy street.  I love the fact .NET catches almost every possible issue at compile-time, and because it's typesafe you know exactly what you're dealing with all of the time; no wondering if that return result is a boolean, int, double, or string, because every method and variable is well defined from the start.  Another thing I laughed about was the cost comparison the author used.  I don't have the book in front of me, but he was suggesting to get an ASP/SQL Server setup going, you'd have to spend $1000 on the OS, $1500 on the Development environment (I'm guessing he meant Visual Studio?), and $5000 for the DB server (the cost for a fully licensed and supported version of SQL Server).  Umm... sorry to burst your bubble guy, but you can run ASP.NET on Windows XP ($200ish?), build your project completely for free (the compiler comes with the .NET framework with is completely free), and use SQL Express which will run just fine for any medium sized project you're going to be creating.  And don't get me started on what can be accomplished with .NET vs. PHP, there's just no comparison (and the author appears to know it).  Finally, I laugh when I think about all the c/c++ coders who have spent countless hours optimizing *nix and making it the stable OS it has come today just to have someone create a "forgiving" scripting language that lets you do all the things you're taught not to do in c, c++, c#, Java, and almost every other real programming language out there.

All that being said, PHP definitely has it's place, especially in this open-source-crazy world we live in today; it is essentially a slightly newer edition of ASP for anti-Microsoft and *nix peeps.  You can whip up some decent database driven web apps with ease in PHP when compared with the otherwise unforgiving *nix world of programming.

[The Crazy Animal]

LOL features are the shit hehe

[DeathCow]

php is for teh nooberto1

Wow i just noticed there are 2 buttons on a mouse now i can use the secondary command function application device number 2! UBERS.

this is all.

whunters are now paladins.