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So I'm willing to learn ASP and CGI..

Posted: Sun Oct 27, 2002 11:53 am
by phice
I can't believe I'm saying these words.. :roll:

Many many job applications require the knowledge of either ASP or CGI, and sometimes both. I was thinking I'd learn ASP first, because it seems much easier then CGI, but what do I know?

Besides W3C, where should I go to learn ASP and/or CGI? And anyone know of a FREE asp AND/OR cgi host? I'm not willing to spend more money on another host to learn such programming languages. :/ My PerfectPHP.com bill is enough for me. :wink:

Anyways, I've got a few ASP books, that didn't really tell me anything at all. I happen to get a book that was an ASP reference manual, which didn't help me at all. ;\

All replies are welcome. Tell me which I should learn first, and why. Thanks!

Posted: Sun Oct 27, 2002 6:01 pm
by volka
for the very beginning: http://www.w3schools.com/asp/default.asp
CGI is not a language like php, it's a convention on how to pass values from and to a webserver. PHP can do it, even with bash you can do CGI-scripts ;)

Posted: Mon Oct 28, 2002 1:44 am
by Takuma
Learn Perl first... Perl comes from C, same as PHP. It's easy if you know PHP as much as you do. ASP comes from BASIC, if you know BASIC then go for it!

Posted: Mon Oct 28, 2002 1:49 am
by volka
listen to me
s.t.a.y a.w.a.y f.r.o.m p.e.r.l
:twisted:

Posted: Mon Oct 28, 2002 7:26 pm
by Tiimmy
volka wrote:listen to me
s.t.a.y a.w.a.y f.r.o.m p.e.r.l
:twisted:
Bah! Perl is a great language, infact I tend to use Perl more than I use PHP, although that's probably because I've been using Perl alot longer than I've been using PHP.

Perl - Practical Extraction & Reporting Language / Pathalogically Eclectic Rubbish Lister - is a language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal).

Perl combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with those languages should have little difficulty with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.) Expression syntax corresponds closely to C expression syntax. Unlike most Unix utilities, Perl does not arbitrarily limit the size of your data--if you've got the memory, Perl can slurp in your whole file as a single string. Recursion is of unlimited depth. And the tables used by hashes (sometimes called "associative arrays") grow as necessary to prevent degraded performance. Perl can use sophisticated pattern matching techniques to scan large amounts of data quickly. Although optimized for scanning text, Perl can also deal with binary data, and can make dbm files look like hashes. Setuid Perl scripts are safer than C programs through a dataflow tracing mechanism that prevents many stupid security holes.

If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little faster, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then Perl may be for you. There are also translators to turn your sed and awk scripts into Perl scripts.

If you want to learn Perl, I suggest you buy a copy of the Perl Black Book and Programming Perl (3rd Ed.). I actually learnt Perl from my father many, many years ago (When I was about 6). It's a really easy language to pick up if you're already familiar with another C-based language, so seeing as you already know PHP, it'll be a breeze!

Also, most servers that provide PHP hosting will provide Perl hosting as well - So check up with your current host first before you go in search of another host. And in my travels I've found a free ASP hosting service; check out http://www.brinkster.com/.