PHP
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Well, Codeproject has changed since my last visit. I am accomplished in MFC/CPP programming, but have now a need to start with PHP. Any good recommendation for good books, (preferably of the paper type), that don't spend the first fifteen chapters about how and why to write a program, but hooks in to my existing MFC experience and knowledge, and speedily goes to the real meat of produceing websites. Thanks, :)
Bram van Kampen
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Well, Codeproject has changed since my last visit. I am accomplished in MFC/CPP programming, but have now a need to start with PHP. Any good recommendation for good books, (preferably of the paper type), that don't spend the first fifteen chapters about how and why to write a program, but hooks in to my existing MFC experience and knowledge, and speedily goes to the real meat of produceing websites. Thanks, :)
Bram van Kampen
Bram van Kampen wrote:
my existing MFC experience and knowledge, and speedily goes to the real meat of produceing websites.
You are talking about the same PHP that the rest of the world must endure? PHP hooks into nothing, not even itself. Do yourself a favor and run while you still can. :)
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Bram van Kampen wrote:
my existing MFC experience and knowledge, and speedily goes to the real meat of produceing websites.
You are talking about the same PHP that the rest of the world must endure? PHP hooks into nothing, not even itself. Do yourself a favor and run while you still can. :)
I tried PHP for the first time at the beginning of this year. PHP done carefully is quite usable, i.e. it's only other people's PHP that's ugly. :)
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I tried PHP for the first time at the beginning of this year. PHP done carefully is quite usable, i.e. it's only other people's PHP that's ugly. :)
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I tried PHP for the first time at the beginning of this year. PHP done carefully is quite usable, i.e. it's only other people's PHP that's ugly. :)
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Bram van Kampen wrote:
my existing MFC experience and knowledge, and speedily goes to the real meat of produceing websites.
You are talking about the same PHP that the rest of the world must endure? PHP hooks into nothing, not even itself. Do yourself a favor and run while you still can. :)
:mad: Endures? PHP is a pleasure to use, it has it's faults but so does every other language. PHP hooks into a range of databases and has a huge number of libraries supporting xml, json, image processing, etc ... people who bag out PHP either have never used it or are just techno snobs ...
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Well, Codeproject has changed since my last visit. I am accomplished in MFC/CPP programming, but have now a need to start with PHP. Any good recommendation for good books, (preferably of the paper type), that don't spend the first fifteen chapters about how and why to write a program, but hooks in to my existing MFC experience and knowledge, and speedily goes to the real meat of produceing websites. Thanks, :)
Bram van Kampen
Personally prefer print myself but I can reference w3 Schools PHP Tutorial[^] which will have you writing PHP in no time!! (REF: DonationCoder.com - PHP Learning Resources[^] << couple more ref links there.)
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Well, Codeproject has changed since my last visit. I am accomplished in MFC/CPP programming, but have now a need to start with PHP. Any good recommendation for good books, (preferably of the paper type), that don't spend the first fifteen chapters about how and why to write a program, but hooks in to my existing MFC experience and knowledge, and speedily goes to the real meat of produceing websites. Thanks, :)
Bram van Kampen
Have you actually tried it? I ask because you ask something that is absolutely valid when starting MFC/CPP, but sounds a bit strange when talking PHP. You can read the whole php_manual.chm in about half a day and you probably should do so since PHP is evolving. A weekend is enough to read the manual and try out everything that catches your attention. PHP is tiny and amateurish, so compared to MVC/CPP the CPP part is super easy. The problem is the MFC part since there are very many PHP frameworks and each has a problem it solves best. It is very hard to find the best framework for a task and weight its advantages against the disadvantages of adding yet another framework. There can be no generic advice here. While MFC/CPP is 99% Visual Studio, the choice of IDE for CPP is much wider and each IDE has particular type of people and, to the minor extend, tasks it suits best. Again, no generic advice here.
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Well, Codeproject has changed since my last visit. I am accomplished in MFC/CPP programming, but have now a need to start with PHP. Any good recommendation for good books, (preferably of the paper type), that don't spend the first fifteen chapters about how and why to write a program, but hooks in to my existing MFC experience and knowledge, and speedily goes to the real meat of produceing websites. Thanks, :)
Bram van Kampen
I believe you will find PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice by Matt Zandstra very usefull.
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Well, Codeproject has changed since my last visit. I am accomplished in MFC/CPP programming, but have now a need to start with PHP. Any good recommendation for good books, (preferably of the paper type), that don't spend the first fifteen chapters about how and why to write a program, but hooks in to my existing MFC experience and knowledge, and speedily goes to the real meat of produceing websites. Thanks, :)
Bram van Kampen
If you are new to web-programming, you have to acquaint yourself with client-side technologies like HTML, CSS and Javascript. Javascript is easier to program with a library, like jQuery to simplify things. PHP is server-side technology. And if you have time, learn HTML5 and CSS3 as well!
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:mad: Endures? PHP is a pleasure to use, it has it's faults but so does every other language. PHP hooks into a range of databases and has a huge number of libraries supporting xml, json, image processing, etc ... people who bag out PHP either have never used it or are just techno snobs ...
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I believe you will find PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice by Matt Zandstra very usefull.
:thumbsup: This is a very usefull book indeed. No matter what background you come from you will find basic php syntax and structures very easy to learn so you can soon continue to look at some of the patterns that can work well in the php world. OO PHP is not too bad these days, although it still has a bit of quirkiness. It'll make you less desperate about the code examples out there and show that you can still create quite a solid codebase if you try even if you don't love the language in the first place.
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Well, Codeproject has changed since my last visit. I am accomplished in MFC/CPP programming, but have now a need to start with PHP. Any good recommendation for good books, (preferably of the paper type), that don't spend the first fifteen chapters about how and why to write a program, but hooks in to my existing MFC experience and knowledge, and speedily goes to the real meat of produceing websites. Thanks, :)
Bram van Kampen
Lol. Yeah, ... (while I haven't been tempted to hang up my C/C++ spurs) I have had glancing contact with PHP. Ad hoc tinkering has helped it evolve from an ugly hack to the drawer in your kitchen where you put things if you don't know what they're for. My 2 recommendations are: - don't overlook the awesome online docs (php.net/manual/en/) that put PHP head and shoulders above any other language I've used for example code snipppets, and.. - have a look at F3 (bcosca.github.com/fatfree). You want a framework, but you don't want most of them. There are numerous alternatives to PHP (obviously). Most often cited are Ruby (on Rails) and the offerings based on server side JavaScript, notably Node.js. There are also some very interesting web app development languages such as Haxe (haxe.org)and Dart (dartlang.org). One of the most original I've seen is Opa (opalang.org) which compiles to a single executable which serves a single web application. One of the most annoying and stupid I've seen is GWT (developers.google.com/web-toolkit/) but then, I hate Java. On the theme of web apps, I write such things with Python, which has a built in webserver (naturally) and can leverage every database and library ever published with C headers. So year, knock yourself out!
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Well, Codeproject has changed since my last visit. I am accomplished in MFC/CPP programming, but have now a need to start with PHP. Any good recommendation for good books, (preferably of the paper type), that don't spend the first fifteen chapters about how and why to write a program, but hooks in to my existing MFC experience and knowledge, and speedily goes to the real meat of produceing websites. Thanks, :)
Bram van Kampen
Here's several websites I used over the years learning PHP. While PHP has changed over the years, these sites remain a source of valuable information on PHP. www.zend.com => Developers of PHP www.phpbuilder.com php.net php.net/manual/en/index.php php.iis.net => I've not used this site, but I figure you may need iis info and stuck it in here. I use Xampp as a development environment myself. apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html => If you need a PHP development environment to test your PHP apps. www.planet-php.net/ www.phpclasses.org => Open source resource of free PHP classes
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Personally prefer print myself but I can reference w3 Schools PHP Tutorial[^] which will have you writing PHP in no time!! (REF: DonationCoder.com - PHP Learning Resources[^] << couple more ref links there.)
Idunno about their PHP tutorial, but after reading this about their Javascript, XML, DOM and other such stuff references and tutorials, I'm not comfortable with using that site anymore.
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Have you actually tried it? I ask because you ask something that is absolutely valid when starting MFC/CPP, but sounds a bit strange when talking PHP. You can read the whole php_manual.chm in about half a day and you probably should do so since PHP is evolving. A weekend is enough to read the manual and try out everything that catches your attention. PHP is tiny and amateurish, so compared to MVC/CPP the CPP part is super easy. The problem is the MFC part since there are very many PHP frameworks and each has a problem it solves best. It is very hard to find the best framework for a task and weight its advantages against the disadvantages of adding yet another framework. There can be no generic advice here. While MFC/CPP is 99% Visual Studio, the choice of IDE for CPP is much wider and each IDE has particular type of people and, to the minor extend, tasks it suits best. Again, no generic advice here.
It's not just PHP that changes, but also the entire web app landscape as a whole - in fact, it has already changed. There's barely a significant platform out there not having a browser with a powerful Javascript interpreter, which makes HTML5 apps very convenient. Such apps let you move most of your logic to the client. Therefore, I'd not worry so much about the MFC part in PHP - doing UI on the server is sort of anachronic. Instead I'd invest time and effort into getting familiar with one of the more powerful Javascript frameworks for application development out there - I don't mean jQuery, which is just a library for rich web pages, I mean the likes of sencha ext/touch, sproutcore, smartclient and the like. My personal favorite is qooxdoo. In spite of it being a lot less popular than other such frameworks, I think it appeals especially to people coming from C# or Java, but also from C++ with MFC. It lets you develop web apps without having to learn even a bit of CSS, and requires just a minimal knowledge of HTML. This is huge. While all current browsers and JavaScript engines are quite potent at the moment, especially at the CSS level there are still differences you need to know, if you want to build web apps using for example ext. Not so with qooxdoo - it abstracts every possible difference. And it also includes tools which a developer coming from a "respectable" language might appreciate - a unit testing framework, an (somewhat outdated) integration with Selenium for automated UI tests, a built-in linter, a build tool for minifying and packaging applications, a package management system plus a framework for adding contribs - extensions to the framework provided by third parties. It also has a widget library richer than most other such frameworks. And it also has a highly active and extremely helpful community, which never seems to get tired to answer the same beginner questions over and over again.
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Idunno about their PHP tutorial, but after reading this about their Javascript, XML, DOM and other such stuff references and tutorials, I'm not comfortable with using that site anymore.
I do see what you are saying. I am yet to see any tutorial that is perfect or fully up to date, and have not participated in w3schools 'certifications', however the tutorial will at least introduce you to the syntax of the language in a progressive and structured manner - which if you can already code is likely all you will need to get started - although I would suggest (an assumption previously on my part) that each example in the tutorial, or any tutorial for that matter, should always be metered against some other reliable reference source to ensure it is consistent in it's application with the intended outcome, operation, and best practice. The examples provided are after all very simple and limited in scope, not taking into account the wide variety of application (or the exploitability) that is possible. EDIT: Should also say that I agree with shiprat's post that php.net[^] is a great resource for the language which should not be overlooked.
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I believe you will find PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice by Matt Zandstra very usefull.
Nikola Breznjak wrote:
I believe you will find PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice by Matt Zandstra very usefull.
Downloading it now.