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Posted by K.J.Williams on 04/02/07 18:09
I was thinking about learning PHP, using PHP+GTK2. Will it let me
write scripts that produce client applications like Java?
Thanks again
On Mar 30, 2:30 am, Toby A Inkster <usenet200...@tobyinkster.co.uk>
wrote:
> K.J.Williams wrote:
> > A friend and I want to learn PHP but we have two totally different
> > programming backgrounds.
> > I have experience with procedural programming in C, and he has
> > experience with Visual BASIC.
> > Well we wanted to know, what type of learning curve ( of difficulty )
> > we would have trying to learn PHP?
>
> PHP's syntax is fairly like C.
>
> - Function calls are "function_name()"
>
> - Lines end in semicolons
>
> - Whitespace is mostly insignificant
>
> - "if", "for", "while" and "switch" syntax is pretty much
> the same
>
> - Most of the mathematical, boolean, assignment and comparison
> operators are the same
>
> The biggest difference in syntax is that variables in PHP always begin
> with a dollar sign, e.g. $foo.
>
> However, PHP is a much higher level language than C. You rarely need to
> worry about casting variables to a different type, and never have to deal
> with pointers. Strings are a basic data type in PHP, and don't need to be
> treated as an array of characters. Indeed, there isn't a character data
> type -- characters are just strings with length 1.
>
> PHP has a lot more functions built in to the language, compared to C where
> a lot of functionality (e.g. database connectivity, regular expressions,
> networking functions) needs to be imported through libraries.
>
> PHP4 has a certain amount of OO support, and PHP 5 has almost as much OO
> support as Java does; however, you don't have to use it!
>
> > Also, What will be the most significant changes for us to adapt to? I
> > wanted to know if PHP is like bash shell scripting for Linux?
>
> Assuming that your previous programming experience is with GUI or
> command-line programming in C/VB, then probably the biggest change you'll
> need to make is not the new programming language that you'll need to
> learn, but the paradigm shift of moving from desktop programming to web
> programming.
>
> With desktop programming, you're drawing objects to the local screen, and
> you can draw these objects whenever you like really. With web programming,
> your program has no direct access to the screen, keyboard or mouse of the
> client machine. All you get told is that someone has requested page X with
> query string Y and post data Z. Your program has a few seconds to figure
> out what data it needs to send back, assemble that into some HTML and
> output that. Then the data goes back to the client, whose machine renders
> it to their screen using a mechanism that is beyond your control. Fun, eh?
>
> Seriously, I think the desktop->web paradigm shift is a much bigger leap
> than the change of programming language. I'd suggest at first writing a
> CGI program, such as a small web forum, in a language you're familiar with
> (e.g. C, or bash scripting) at first, and getting a feel for how web
> programming as a whole works, and then make the shift to doing it with
> PHP, which will then be comparatively easy.
>
> --
> Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
> Contact Me ~http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
> Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux
>
> * = I'm getting there!
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