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Yes, that is true. Find the new job before quitting the old. Personal and professional growth is absolutely a part of the decision criteria for selecting and staying with a job. The fact that it has taken the original poster years to figure this out does not say anything positive about his or her drive.

Read some books. Here are some recommendations.

• The Practice of Programming by Kernighan and Pike is an all time classic. This one is my strongest recommendation.
• Is object oriented programming the next step for you? Here is a classic by Grady Booch.
• I find Martin Fowler to be a great author on next step kinds of topics for software developers.
• Are design patterns the next step for you? The original GoF book is my recommendation.
• Are relational databases your next step? My favorite book on this subject is a LAN Times Guide to SQL.
• Is the next step to be a team lead? Then you should really read Code Complete by Steve McConnell.

I don't know if this is a "which db + scripting language is better" request or "is there an access front end like tool thing for something that isn't access" question. Unless you are having serious data/production/security loss/issues, I think you should stick with what your people know.

My favorite == MySQL + ruby.

Here is a class for php that "displays results of sql statements in a browseable and editable format akin to excel or Access". http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/1547.html

Here is a cross platform IDE if your wanting to teach people to use php instead of vb. http://tulip.solis.coop.br/us/index.php

I also enjoys this site when i am making my homepages, its a good resource for those who are into PHP and OOP and want to speed the process up a bit.

Yeah, it's too bad PHP doesn't support some sort of database abstraction layer. ;-)

Realistically, if you design an application from the start with even just a little bit of, well. . . design, and consideration for portability and future growth, database independance is not very difficult.

Unfortunately, it's been my experience that most people don't really think beyond the next few hours when they're coding, which means that making things better later on is a huge chore.

You may need to start by converting your iso-8859-1 or other European ASCII to UTF-8 or another sensible Unicode charset. Some of our MySQL data was in the dreaded windows-1252 encoding, and I had to convert it to UTF. I downloaded the Convert Charset class (found via http://phpclasses.org/ from Mikoaj Jdrzejak, and with that I discovered I could basically convert anything I wanted from whatever charset to whichever charset I like. Wrote a couple scripts, and that was that.

One of the probs with PDFLib is that you may not be able to get it installed as a PHP library where you're hosting. Thankfully a number of PHP code versions exist.

One I hear good things about is the R&OS pdf class.

Another I found was an HTML to PDF convertor from here.

I've not used either of those so YMMV.

Some of the PHP code sites have a few as well.

You have uncommented code with embedded HTML that is database specific. Don't get me wrong... if you have a small project that works with a quick hack, then that's ok.

With any modern PHP project, what's wrong with using templates, PEAR, and object oriented programming? Most PHP books out there tend to spin the mantra of PHP and MySQL or Postgresql without taking the time to show how to use PHP in a modern context where it deserves to be. Thus much PHP programming gets scoffed at because it tends to be unmaintainable.

I'm sorry, but at this point I'm unable to recommend almost any of the PHP books out there. They mostly encourange terrible PHP system development practices -- embedded HTML, database specific coding, non OOP development.

There are a few sites that are showing the light. phpclasses.org only has OOP based PHP programs and the tools you need to use templating, mailing, databases in a thoroughly modular manner, and dont forget the PEAR site which documents and make available the excellent PEAR classes for PHP.

A few other sites also are preparing PHP libraries and development environments that are a joy to work with.

For PHP public www information is better that 99% of the books out there, and in the case of this book... 100%

There seem to be two separate efforts to bring robust object oriented apps (classes, really ) to PHP. One of them is PEAR, and it is obviously being done in conjunction with the primary PHP development team. The other efforts is Manuel Lemos' PHPClasses.org site. The PHPClasses site is much more grass-roots and currently has a much wider variety of classes available in it. Hopefully these groups can work together. I don't know Manuel personally, but as someone who has followed his web site for about six months or a year, I'm hoping that somebody at Zend or wherever the financial backing is behind PHP can offer this guy a job and take advantage of the momentum that he has built up. It would probably speed up the rate at which classes were submitted to pear.php.net.

People keep mentioning php.net. I have to put my vote in for phpclasses.org. No friendly tutorials here, just the code you need. Functionality ranges from basic stuff like turning recordsets into an HTML table, to more advanced things like data caching.