Leaning web development (php, mySQL, AJAX...)

[Brandon Sandrowicz]

On 12/18/07, Aaron Vegh <aaronvegh-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > It might just be easier to learn something like Drupal.  That way a
> > lot of the tedious stuff is done for you.  Instead of re-inventing the
> > wheel and all.
>
> Bah. Why invent a particular brand of wheel when you can make your
> own? :-) Learning PHP and MySQL is the way to go: it's the
> always-there, 1-2 punch of web application development. Drupal is
> fine, and Rails is cool, but frameworks make you work a certain way.
>
> I used a dead-tree book called "PHP and MySQL Development", some years
> ago, to learn how to do this stuff. Here's it on amazon.com, which is
> an updated version:
>
> http://www.amazon.com/PHP-MySQL-Development-Developers-Library/dp/0672329166/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197993692&sr=8-1
>
> Great book, and very easy to follow through from total basics to
> advanced topics. I used it to help me as I tackled a project head-on
> (to echo a former poster, it's the only way to go). And unless you
> have an ebook reader on hand, you can't beat having a separate thing
> on your desk to reference as you code.
>
> Cheers!
> Aaron.


You say that, but it's not like anyone is arguing that instead of
using libjpeg you need to write your own code to parse JPEGs.  It's
not like people are arguing to toss out libreadline.

It's a matter of preference.  I have never personally used Drupal, but
I know that a lot of people create a web app code that is horrible
mangled and unable to be maintained because they just code by the seat
of their pants.  And coding directly in PHP MySQL allows people to
make horrible mistakes like not properly escaping user input that is
going into an SQL query.  It's not like in Perl where you have DBI
that abstracts some of that for you.

At least the last time that I looked at PHP you had to do all of that
on your own, at least calling a function to escape all of the data
individually, and then sticking it into a SQL statement string for the
query.  I just was mentioning Drupal because it's a large project with
plenty of support and active development.

Especially when starting out, I would think that it might be better to
start with the overall system, and then possibly work down into the
guts of it yourself later on.

If you aren't going to use something like Drupal, I would at least
suggest trying to find some sort of DBI-type interface to interacting
with databases, and using ready-made templating engines like Smarty
instead of trying to completely invent all of that on your own.

--
Brandon Sandrowicz
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