you get my award for most 'novice' friendly thus far...much thanks

You’re quite welcome! Please keep in mine – a lot of the folks here are happy to help, and we’re just trying to guide you to finding your own solutions. As volunteers, we give it the time we have, and if there’s frustration, it’s often not due to meanness, just a wish for people to meet us half-way with questions.

Asking for broad-ranged aid on a situation is likely to led people to believe you wish tutoring, not aid on a specific topic; you can read the excellent Understanding and Using PerlMonks for more on how to ask questions 'round here. Does that put some of the reactions into perspective?

does php allow you the same flexibility as perl? i see courses in the adult ed for php, but nothing on perl

You do like the tough questions, don't you? :)

PHP is a distant relation to Perl, focused on publishing web pages. I confess to not having made anything with if, just editing and fiddling with a couple of pre-made apps, like Wordpress, that use PHP.

At a jump, and not to start another PHP vs. Perl flamewar, I'm going to say my impression is that PHP is very popular, in part because it’s easier to write websites in PHP as opposed to standard Perl -- although modules like Embperl offer very similar functionality -- and about the same level of basic connect-to-database extensions/modules as Perl. PHP seems to lack depth in the quantity and quality of Modules, as well as being somewhat more difficult to build extensive and complex web applications in.

I understand that PHP has something similar to Perl's taint mode, as well as the SQL-injection-resistant placeholder ability of DBI; their maturity, in comparison to Perl's years of experience (tainting has been a part of Perl since before the World Wide Web was created, much less CGI), is unknown to me. These aspects are, to me, critical in any Internet-facing web application.

To sum up: PHP is worth a try, and is currently far more popular than Perl -- yet it’s not nearly as flexible as Perl. Yet taking a good course on PHP beats out not learning anything by a country mile. :)

----Asim, known to some as Woodrow.

In reply to Re^8: obtaining yyyy-mm-dd via a calendar object by Asim
in thread obtaining yyyy-mm-dd via a calendar object by gmacfadden

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