[TriLUG] PHP

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Cate Serino wrote:

>Hi Trilug members,
>
>Let me begin that, I am a instructor and want to prepare my students in
>the best way for the market place.  I have the opprotunity to teach
>either VB.net or PHP.  Any thoughts on either platform.  I know that I am 
>speaking to a bias crowd, but please keep you comments to your thoughts
>about the market place.  Meaning do you think that the positions in
>either PHP or vb.net will grow.  Also any recomendations for books for
>PHP.  Any help would be great.
>
>Many thanks,
>
>Cate Serino
>
Dave Matusiak makes a very good point in suggesting teaching broader 
"programming principles" and the cross-learning benefits of PERL and 
PHP.  They are quite similar, so much so that once you've become 
proficient in one, picking up the other is really a weekend activity.  
Your programming style will always stray towards which ever one you 
learned first, but you can definitely port those skills with out great 
difficulty.

There's one other point that hasn't been made clearly yet.  Learning 
VB.NET means you will be able to code something up to solve a problem in 
a Microsoft environment.  Learning PHP is vastly more versatile, in that 
you can run PHP on top of IIS, Apache, or stand-alone in either 
environment.  I have two good friends (poor blokes) who do PHP 
development mostly on Windows, and make a healthy living at it.  I have 
yet to meet any commercial developers doing VB.NET code on Mono on a 
*NIX platform (if that's even possible, I'm not sure).

Suffice to say that VB.NET is a platform-specific skill.  PHP is a broad 
skill that can be applied in most any work environment.  That's not to 
say you're going to get hired in a VB.NET shop as a PHP programmer, but 
if you're hired as a general purpose programmer to accomplish a task, 
you've got a leg up if your skills are more likely to run on existing 
platforms.  The same applies if your students don't end up becoming 
professional programmers, but stray more towards admin work, or 
HTML-focused web development work, or any other fields where programming 
isn't the primary focus, but you need to whack out some code from time 
to time.  The more likely they can apply those skills to the platform 
they've chosen for other reasons, the better.

Aaron S. Joyner
Admittedly and happily biased PERL/PHP programmer