Paul DuBois's books on the subject are widely considered excellent. I've even seen them called the best entry-level technical books on any tech topic. He discusses both Perl and PHP at length.

Side stepping that. I like MySQL. I use MySQL and have for years. I would recommend if you're starting from scratch that you go with PostgreSQL instead. I would also recommend Perl over PHP but PHP is awfully convenient and well supported on budget hosts. If you just want to get going and do a little hacking: PHP. If you think you have a future in this stuff and plan to take it deeper: Perl (it's a superior jumping off place for *many* technical issues and even other languages). Also, it's easy, and natural at first, to write insecure code with databases in any language. Make sure to search for tutorials on security and SQL injection attacks.

Have fun.

In reply to Re: MySQL Book and PHP vs Perl by Your Mother
in thread MySQL Book and PHP vs Perl by bluethundr

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