Slashdot Mirror

Their list is great -- I'll be reading some of those articles for weeks before I get through them all. I'm especially interested in the 7 security blunders article. Nice!

But they did leave off a lot of sites that are useful. Here are a few:

• PHP Resource Index - a few thousand scripts for downloading, most free, all PHP.
• PHP Builder Forums -- the PHP Builder site is pretty useful all by itself, but in the forums there are thousands of people willing to answer your PHP questions.
• PHP Freaks -- one of the guys behind this site wrote a great PHP book. The site is excellent.
• ADOdb Database Abstraction Layer -- okay, okay, this isn't really a site, so much as a product. But still, it's a very efficient DBAL, and it should be used for every database query.

Anyone want to pitch in with some more? I'm sure there are some very useful sites that I've completely missed (and which the IBM site missed, too).

The link below is more detailed information of the phpBB exploit.

http://www.phpfreaks.com/articles/245/0.php

I actually learned HTML at age 11. Later I visited a site(looks like they went down since then) that gave me all kinds of tips for making a good website. It introduced me to CSS, taught me about usability, and basically gave me all the essential knowledge I needed that simply learning HTML won't give you. Eventually I learned XHTML; after seeing tags with /> at the end, I got curious. So, of course, I looked it up and realized it was XHTML and produced "cleaner" code; being a neat freak I switched at once. At age 14 I learned PHP and how to use it with MySQL databases. I wrote a whole "membership system" after learning it. Of course, being new to the language it took a long time, but I can surely say it's what really allowed me to learn all the basics and some intermediate skills. Most of the initial work was done with help from PHPFreaks, then after understanding it all I added multiple things to it.

So, now that I've gone on for a long enough time, I'll get to the point. As of now I can use XHTML, CSS, PHP with MySQL, some Javascript (I don't use it very frequently, mostly just the basics, so I can't say I know it extremely well), Visual Basic, and even a little C and C++ (I still haven't gotten around to learning more). So, when talking about multiple languages or complex code, I really don't think you can ask if it'll be too advanced for those 13-year-olds. Because, no matter what it is, if someone will take the time to dedicate themselves to learning it, it can be done. Finally, if anyone is wondering, I'm currently 16 years old. I know plenty of other people my age or even younger that know as much if not more than myself. I firmly believe you can't define knowledge or the complexity of one's mind by age alone. Some people just comprehend better than others, and there are surely some 13-year-olds like that out there. And yes, I do think that many of these young coders (including myself) can produce a website that does look professional. In fact, I've actually been paid before to create such a website. Just my 2 cents, though... Flame me if you wish. ;-)

ASP includes database connection pooling, something that costs many thousands of dollars on Unix

Oh yeah? Or, perhaps you meant this one?

Perhaps you forgot to mention persistent, shared memory objects, which ASP cannot do, but PHP CAN? Get a clue, dude.

PHP is aweseome. It's powerful, reasonably fast, allows for incredibly rapid development, lets you get alot done FAST, and it's free.

What's to argue with? I use PHP for

1) client application development with PHP-GTK

2) Exensive server based development a la LAMP .

3) Shell/other scripting with its CLI interface.

I've written daemons with PHP. It's clean, simple, and powerful. My best is a large, 50,000+ line application in it. Write a clean codebase with consistent error-handling, and it's a breeze.

It's downright fun to take the contents of a file, turn it into an array with a single line, loop thru it with 1 more line, do a few if statements, and process a 500 MB file in 5 minutes flat.

I *love* replacing a large, complex mini-applet with 12 lines of PHP code - I've done it time and time again.

And, to write in it all day long?! Pure heaven.

I'll be watching PHP5 - I've not deployed it anywhere, and probably won't even start until PHP-GTK 2 (with PHP5, GTK2.X) is out.

BTW, I'm also using Apache 1.3...

ASP includes database connection pooling, something that costs many thousands of dollars on Unix

Oh yeah? Or, perhaps you meant this one?

Perhaps you forgot to mention persistent, shared memory objects, which ASP cannot do, but PHP CAN? Get a clue, dude.

PHP is aweseome. It's powerful, reasonably fast, allows for incredibly rapid development, lets you get alot done FAST, and it's free.

What's to argue with? I use PHP for

1) client application development with PHP-GTK

2) Exensive server based development a la LAMP .

3) Shell/other scripting with its CLI interface.

I've written daemons with PHP. It's clean, simple, and powerful. My best is a large, 50,000+ line application in it. Write a clean codebase with consistent error-handling, and it's a breeze.

It's downright fun to take the contents of a file, turn it into an array with a single line, loop thru it with 1 more line, do a few if statements, and process a 500 MB file in 5 minutes flat.

I *love* replacing a large, complex mini-applet with 12 lines of PHP code - I've done it time and time again.

And, to write in it all day long?! Pure heaven.

I'll be watching PHP5 - I've not deployed it anywhere, and probably won't even start until PHP-GTK 2 (with PHP5, GTK2.X) is out.

BTW, I'm also using Apache 1.3...

It's not really a mod, just a php_embed.c and php_embed.h which wrap up some TSRMLS functions, not much documentation on it, but a decent thread here.

• PHP Perl-compatible
• Python re module
• Python re howto

• Pick an Editor
  My personal favourite is KATE (K Advanced Text Editor). It has PHP highlighting built in (Easier on the eyes), it can have multiple documents open at the same time, and has some advanced features in comparison to WordPad.
• Save it to server directory
  This is located at /var/www/html/
• Pick a browser
  Mandrake comes with several browsers (Start->Networking->WWW) but my personal favourite is Phoenix.
• Test it in the browser Say you saved you PHP script to
  /var/www/html/myscript.php
  then you would be able to access it by typing in the address
  http://localhost/myscript.php
  This should work fine.
• Configuration
  I found the default configuration fine, but I needed to set up users for mysql. To do this I used Webmin, it should be on your Install CD if it isn't installed already. Once you have Webmin installed, in your browser visit:
  https://localhost:10000/
  Log in using your root (Admin) name and password. Then click servers, then click mysql, and there you go. For a frontend to mysql, i would suggest using PHPMyAdmin
• Learning PHP
  For learning PHP, I would suggest buying a book (I used "PHP A Beginners's Guide", published by osborne see here If you just want to use online resources, I personally think PHP's online manual (Just search The PHP Website. I also find PHP Freaks a good site, with lots of tutorials, examples, free scripts and a friendly forum, if you get stuck
• Hopefully that's enough
  If you need more help, feel free to email me. People will also be happy to help you at MandrakeExpert.com and for specific PHP needs, go to the above mentioned PHP Freaks. Hope I was able to help!