Posted by Andy Dingley on 08/01/07 11:59

On 31 Jul, 17:09, "M" <nowhere...@twilightzone.net> wrote:
> I'm okay at designing "brochure" style websites -- essentially every high
> school kid is capable of that these days.

Likewise PHP

> What would be the next best thing to learn to take it to the next level?

Why? From interest, or because you want a job doing it?

PHP is simple and useful. It's also a ghastly language and will teach
you evil coding habits that make you almost unusable for any real
software development afterwards!

More to the point, every teenager and their dog is writing (bad) PHP
these days and there are no good jobs in it. You can certainly get
such a job, but it's a minimum wage sort of role and you're thrown
into a vast pit of undistinguished crappy-coders. There's no reward to
being any better than this, you just won't get recognised for it.

If you _are_ a good PHP coder who knows enough to do good work with
it, then you're in a tiny minority. You're also likely to have to go
and work as your own bespoke complete-service web shop (not even
contract or freelance), because it's the only way to distinguish
yourself from the muppets.


If you can find hosting for it (not impossible, but harder than PHP),
Python or even Ruby are far nicer languages than PHP. If you control
the server yourself (maybe you host over home broadband) then this is
easy. They (especially Python) also teach far better coding style.

Perl is obsolete. Use Python instead.

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