Mystery cult ([info]mysterycult) wrote,
@ 2008-01-25 19:19:00
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Technical query
I'm vaguely thinking of putting together a website, mostly as a technical exercise in honing my skillz. Probably about ornamental patterns or something, I dunno.

The important questions are:
- Can anyone recommend a cheap (ideally free, but that's too much to ask) web host that supports (at least) MySQL, Perl scripts, and PHP?
- PHP: what's it good for? What will it do for me that Perl scripts don't?
- Those menus which drop-down when you put your mouse over them: do people do that with JavaScript? PHP? Something else? All of the above?
- Are there any good books on this kind of topic? I've been making Perl scripts that access a MySQL database to produce HTML throughout my PhD, so I know basics, but I'm not sure how to go from there to having mad skillz.

UPDATE: Obviously, I am familiar with the concept of "Google it" and "Buy the most relevant-sounding O'Reilly textbook". However, this is one of those areas where these techniques produce an awful lot of avenues of enquiry.

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[info]lieutenanth
2008-01-25 07:36 pm UTC (link)
- I'm with web-mania - it's about £25 for a year. They support MySQL and PHP, dunno about Perl. Don't know why you'd need Perl when you've got PHP...
- PHP is awesome for simple web pages. It's also got stacks of builtins for dealing with email, XML, mysql database access, you name it.
- It's a combination of HTML, Javascript and CSS. HTML supports events that can be hooked up to elements - things like "onmouseover", "onclick", etc. These events can trigger scripts to run, and the scripting language everyone uses is Javascript. What the Javascript usually does is simply alter the CSS class of an element or two, so that instead of being hidden it is revealed.
- Books are for the weak. W3Schools has some good references on the core web technologies, including HTML, CSS and Javascript. Just google the sort of thing you're interested in plus "tutorial" and you'll often find what you're looking for.

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[info]mysterycult
2008-01-25 07:45 pm UTC (link)
Ah, brilliant, this is exactly what I needed to know. On the books front, I suppose what I was wondering was about was not so much guidance on "What can I do with a given technology?" as "What technologies should I use for a given task?" which is harder to research by Googling it. However, if the answer to the latter is "Mug up on CSS, Javascript and PHP and you'll be sorted" then I guess that's that problem solved.

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[info]lieutenanth
2008-01-25 10:43 pm UTC (link)
Pretty much. Just remember that PHP is basically just a server-side way of generating yourself a page made up of HTML, CSS and Javascript. Keep that distinction between server-side and client-side.

PHP is ace because it has a whole slew of builtins and libraries. Before you do anything in PHP, look in the function library, and then look in the PEAR package repository, because it has probably already been done.

Finally, be wary of Javascript - Firefox and IE support it in different ways, so you need to make sure that all of the functions you are using are available in FF's Ecmascript and IE's activescript.

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