[WEB4LIB] Re: Feedback on Adobe GoLive 5.0

[Raymond Wood]

On Mar 9 , "Thomas Dowling" <tdowling at ohiolink.edu> wrote:
 
> > I think PHP is really easy to learn, but you will have to
> > write the pages yourself.  If you want to learn to use a
> > GUI program that does the programming for you, I can't
> > recommend anything.
> >
> 
> I have to second this.  If your server doesn't already support PHP, there
> are a couple of hoops to jump through to get Apache+PHP compiled and
> installed, but a small bribe to your sysadmin should get that done.
> Beyond that, I picked up a copy of _Beginning PHP4_ from Wrox Press and
> had PHP-based pages talking to SQL databases in about half a day.  And
> that included compiling and installing everything twice (whoops, that
> should have been "--with-msql", not "--with-mysql").
> 
> Thomas Dowling

I read recently that PHP passed the 'now being used on 5 million web sites 
worldwide' mark sometime very recently.  It is a great open source tool, 
reasonably easy to learn, powerful, and is cross-platform too.  It seems to be 
one of the best options available for allowing web pages to talk to databases.  
AFAIK there is even another free tool available that will convert ASP scripts to 
PHP (hint, hint :) but I have not used this myself - YMMV.

Raymond