Thinking of getting my hands dirty with some "real" programming, is Perl the way to go, or like Cees should I be looking at PHP.
Some advice for a beginner would be appreciated.
Cees, did you go to [php.net] ??
9.4. PHP vs. Perl?
The biggest advantage of PHP over Perl is that PHP was designed for scripting for the web where Perl was designed to
do a lot more and can because of this get very complicated. The flexibility / complexity of Perl makes it easier to write
code that another author / coder has a hard time reading. PHP has a less confusing and stricter format without losing
flexibility. PHP is easier to integrate into existing HTML than Perl. PHP has pretty much all the 'good' functionality of
Perl; constructs, syntax and so on, without making it as complicated as Perl can be. Perl is a very tried and true
language, it's been around since the late eighties, but PHP is maturing very quickly.
I just like perl. There hasn't been an application that I wanted to make that couldn't be done in perl. A lot of seo work is actually not in the cgi realm. In the php/mySQL combo it is the mySQL db engine that is speedy. There are very fast mod_perl/mySQL web applications running now.
Last I checked the Perl interpreter is actually a bit faster than php's.
The dveshed tutorial on mySQL and php. [devshed.com]
And here is a sleeper [perl.apache.org]. I guess it is perl's answer to PHP.
This is something Brett will dig. -> [chamas.com ]
