The Best thing about PHP
By Toby Allen
Friday, September 13, 2002
I've recently started using PHP for the small amount of web stuff that I end up doing. What a treat! And you know what the best thing about it is?
Its Help file. It works.
For years I used ASP with VBScript whenever I did any web stuff, and there was always one real weakness. Anyone who has tried to wrestle with the desktop version of MSDN (or the web version for that matter) will know how difficult it is to actually find the information you are looking for in that behemoth of information (i'm sure someone once said something about too much being no better than too little).
Whenever I'm doing webstuff I always at certain points end up using a plain old text editor (well Textpad if you dont have it get it) to do bits and pieces even if you have an IDE to use. It just seems to happen that way with Webstuff. Always at some point you need to lookup the exact name of a function or its list of parameters, or just go looking for a function to do a specific thing. Ever tried to do that with MSDN? Its such an ordeal its almost not worth it.
PHP on the other hand has wonderful people who have affiliated themselves with the "PHP Documentation Group". They have done a great job of putting together a help file that has all the information, is big and is easy to find what you need. I use the PHP manual in a similar way to the way I use my Delphi help file. For little things looking up the unit of an object or function, in php how to spell a function, I open the String Functions , Date / Time functions pages to see what I can do with those types.
Basically it just does what it is supposed to, which is provide a programmers reference to a language. It does not try to be a programmers reference to "every" lanaguage.
I will over the next bit be writing a bit more about PHP. If you've never seen it in action, you can download various bits and pieces from these sites.
- PHP itself and documentation (www.php.net)
- PHP Edit (Great free IDE written in delphi) (www.phpedit.net)
Until next time, thanks for reading.