Phpers stupid??

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John Cartwright
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Post by John Cartwright »

Alot of your reasoning is personal preference, everyone may not share these same values..
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Jenk
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Post by Jenk »

nameless1, you could always write your own book or create your own site with your suggested tutorials and articles. That way, if your preferred structure is as awesome as you think it might be.. you'll reap the rewards in sales..

That's what makes php so great, and gives it problems, anyone can contribute..
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RobertGonzalez
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Post by RobertGonzalez »

It would seem to me that the 'persona' that PHP has garnered has been because of a combination of things: 1) Cost; 2) Availability; 3) Community; and 4) Ease of us. The sad fact is that since PHP literally costs nothing, and about 90% of web hosts offer it on their servers, and their is a substantial open-source community teaching everyone how easy it is to use, PHP has become what bothers you. But a thing to remembers is that most entry level web developers didn't learn HTML (or FrontPage) to go into business for themselves or to get a job as a web developer. Most folks want to build themselves a site so they don't have to pay for someone else to do it.

Couple that with the popularity of PHP and how high up in search rankings it is when searching for web development related searches, and you can see how easy it is for someone to want to start using it. Then, mix into that equation that someone can literally pick up a web tutorial on 'Your first PHP page' and see this:

Code: Select all

<html>
<head><title>My First PHP Page</title></head>

<body>
<?php
$today = date('m/d/Y');
echo "Hello there, today is $today";
?>
</body>
</html>
Consider, for a moment, that almost anyone that has ever wanted to add some form of dynamic content to the their static HTML would just go nuts over something like this.

Now fast forward three years, after a newbie PHP coder has turned into an actual full fledged developer. Now OOP is more of a consideration that how PHP will build your HTML tables. Making a clean separation of code and markup is now a consideration. Server load, database connections, memory use, design patterns, etc all become players in development... for professionals. We, as professionals, care about these things. Newbies could really care less if their pages render the way they want them too. That is who the more common tutorials are targeted at. You cannot take someone that has very little programming experience and try to throw the advanced level PHP stuff at them. You'll blow them out of the water and probably take a few others with them.

I can understand being frustrated with parts of the community or the way in which server-side coding is presented. But try to remember that in large part, these tutorials are meant for beginners, not professionals.
Ree
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Post by Ree »

$query = "SELECT * FROM blah WHERE name = '$name'";

This is another great example of something that is wrong. Anyone with any experience should know about placing variables in double quotes and why it is bad practice databases are enough of a slow down on their own they dont needed to suffer from more performance loss due to the fact they have variables inside double quotes.
Pardon? The database access doesn't slow down a damn because of that string alone.
Charles256
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Post by Charles256 »

(if anyone gives me smurf about ego like the last guy ill slap you as i just said I am not doing php for a living yet as I want it so I no longer have to learn anything other then an api on the job that includes other web subjects not just php)
can't believe the thread wasn't locked right there. :-D
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Luke
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Post by Luke »

yea... I think I'd reconsider my attitude a little man. You're starting to irritate people.
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RobertGonzalez
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Post by RobertGonzalez »

Ok folks, lets keep this thing friendly. Someone expressed an opinion. If you have one to toss back (about the subject, not the poster), let 'er rip. Otherwise, keep comments about posters out of this thread.

This goes for all of us, including the OP. No comments about other posters or threats to other posters (like Charles256 referenced).

[url=http://forums.devnetwork.net/viewtopic.php?t=30037]Forum Rules[/url] Section 1.3 wrote:13. A wide variety of opinions may be expressed on this public discussion forum. Respect positions which differ from your own. We like to see a vigorous intellectual discussion which proceeds politely and addresses the technical merits of different positions. Do not expect that anyone will alter their opinion of a topic regardless of however logical you believe your argument to be. Do not attack anyone personally for whatever reason - doing so contravenes the spirit in which this forum was founded and can have serious consequences.
timvw
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Post by timvw »

Like it or not, PHP has become the Visual Basic of the web (and i've been saying this the last 5 years, so it didn't happen overnight :P).

As with everything, one needs to develop a critical mind. Most certainly if the information is gathered via a medium like the internet. And yes, the more you know, the easier it is to spot mistakes/errors in other's writings and examples... But as long as you don't write and publish your own articles you'll never know how hard it actually is....
timvw
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Post by timvw »

Everah wrote:Ok folks, lets keep this thing friendly.
I think that went wrong from the start. After looking at the subject and the content of the post i thought it was nothing more than a troll.. Now that i've read some more from the op i can see where he's coming from... wonder where he's going though...
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RobertGonzalez
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Post by RobertGonzalez »

timvw wrote:
Everah wrote:Ok folks, lets keep this thing friendly.
I think that went wrong from the start.
I agree with that 100%.
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Chris Corbyn
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Post by Chris Corbyn »

I am not doing php for a living yet as I want it so I no longer have to learn anything other then an api on the job that includes other web subjects not just php
Good luck with that. I seriously don't mean any offence by this but that comes across as though you're still very new to programming. If you really think you've learned all there is to learn you've learned nothing. I never want to stop learning... I mean, who'd want to do such a mundane job?
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