[Melbourne-pm] FW: perl, CGI and php questions

[John Thornton]

-----Original Message-----
From: John Thornton [mailto:jdthornton at ozemail.com.au] 
Sent: Sunday, 24 August 2008 11:38 AM
To: 'Tim Hogard'
Cc: John Thornton
Subject: RE: [Melbourne-pm] perl, CGI and php questions

Mr Hogard
          Yes, I agree with you if you are saying that I am rank amateur at
Perl, or for that matter computing in general. Frankly, I wouldn't know the
front end of a computer from the back end. 

          But you do realise, if you have the sense to see it, that I am
doing anyone a favour by posting as an absolute beginner at Perl on this
board? In any scientific approach to teaching anyone anything, methods are
tried that may or may not work. Now, as a beginner who:

          installed Perl about a week ago
          installed apache about a week ago
          has never done any computer programming in real terms [I have
played a tiny bit with python but I wouldn't count that.] 
          has never studied computer science of any type

          I have managed to succeed within this week at doing 3 things:

          [1] installing XAMPP including getting apache 2.29 working
          [2] testing a perl script "hello world" on the command line with
success
          [3] getting "hello world" to work in my firefox browser with
success by using a CGI directory. 

         ****
           [2] I did by myself from VTC tutorials.

           [1] and [3] I did with the help of this mailing list and another
forum. Thanks to all who helped! 

          Thus surely I am an example of methods of
help\education\self-education that worked. If I were in the business of
teaching Perl I would have some interest in whatever those successful
methods were!! For on a spectrum of ignorance to a professor of computing I
am surely at the ignorant end. 

          If someone like Mr Hogard thinks that I have no place in the elite
perl clique of this mailing list then I think is both sad and foolish on his
part. 

          We all had to start somewhere. I put a lot of time and effort into
doing [1] and [3]; I didn't go to this list expecting the answer to be given
to me on a plate. 

           I have not seen enough of Perl to see if I like it yet or not. It
is interesting in that its rules are pretty flexible. I will keep ploughing
through the VTC tutorials which, by the way, are incredible and cover every
topic in computing from .net framework to search engine optimisation etc.
And as a graphics student I get access to the lot as part of my course, not
just the free ones :)

           Yours sincerely
           John      

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Hogard [mailto:thogard at abnormal.com] 
Sent: Sunday, 24 August 2008 4:59 AM
To: John Thornton
Subject: Re: [Melbourne-pm] perl, CGI and php questions

> 
> 
>        [1] No disrespect to perl, but why are jobsites like SEEK dominated
> by jobs in php programming in web programming? 
We don't hire amateurs nor do we look in places where we have to deal 
with them.
> 
>        [2] If I make a correct script in another language, php, Java etc,
do
> I save it to the same cgi-bin that worked for perl? That is, assuming that
> again it is intended for browser formatting. 
no.

-tim

ps.
I deal with billions of dollars with perl.

-tim