If one's interests were digital library data curation and migration, the most useful things to know would be XSLT, bash scripting, Perl, and knowledge of regular expressions. I've done a lot of migration with bash scripting, regular expressions, and XSLT alone, without the need for Perl, but Perl or SAX would be useful in migrating non-XML or invalid XML/SGML. I used simple, iterative scripts to migrate thousands of TEI files from TEI Lite to a more consistent schema. I've done similar things to go from a 500 page HTML thumbnail gallery of manuscripts into an EAD guide. Roy is right in stating there is more to programming than web pages. A lot of dirty work behind the scenes in libraries is done without the sexiness of PHP or Ruby on Rails applications.
Ethan On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 4:36 PM, Genny Engel <gen...@sonoma.lib.ca.us>wrote: > Agreed -- I coded up many nice SQL injection vulnerabilities before I ever > learned PHP. As for Perl, anyone remember the notorious formmail.cgi from > Matt's Script Archive? > > For **web** programming specifically, it's critically important for newbies > to get a grounding in security issues, regardless of the language being > used. Also, in usability issues, accessibility issues, etc. .... for > anything that's actually going to get used by the public. But really, that > mainly applies if you're going to be developing a whole app complete with > web-accessible front end. > > If your interests aren't particularly in web development, you have a whole > other set of potential issues to learn about, and I'm probably ignorant of > most of them. > > My first language was C, which according to langpop.com [1] is still the > most popular language around! If you don't want to get bogged down in the > web security issues, etc., then you might lean toward learning a > general-purpose language like C or Java, rather than one designed for a > specific purpose as PHP is for web development. > > > [1] http://www.langpop.com/ > > > >>> yitzchak.schaf...@gmx.com 03/25/10 07:56AM >>> > On 3/24/2010 17:43, Joe Hourcle wrote: > > I know there's a lot of stuff written in it, but *please* don't > > recommend PHP to beginners. > > > > Yes, you can get a lot of stuff done with it, but I've had way too many > > incidents where newbie coders didn't check their inputs, and we've had > > to clean up after them. > > Another way of looking at this: part of learning a language is learning > its vulnerabilities and how to deal with them. And how to avoid > security holes in web code in general. >
