(reply to Ed Felt's message below, do not include quoted portion starting
----- Legal Aide, Access)


Ed, as to your questions, here's my $0.80 (inflation adjusted):

1) PHP Should absolutely be a good part of the curriculum. Anyone who says
it's dead is tooting the same horn that those who claim the home PC is dead
are using. It's not dead, not even close. I don't think other programming
ideas should be ignored though. I love PHP, don't get me wrong. It's my
favorite web language. But at the same time, if you're getting them read
for Corporate life, they should understand PERL too, and to a lesser extent
Python. After all, those are the alternate Ps in the LAMP architecture.

2) As to how important MySQL is, I have to say I'm of mixed opinion on this
one. MySql is very effective, and it's popular in many environments, but
I'm personally more partial to Postgres. Still, I did start learning SQL
via MySQL and I'm grateful to it. I've never heard of MariaDB so I can't
testify good or bad on that one.

3) I think it SHOULD be a LAMP class. You can mention the other
technologies briefly, but unless you're making this a multi-semester class,
there's more than enough material to cover via the standard LAMP stack. If
someone wants to learn more about NodeJS vs. Ruby, or MongoDB vs. MariaDB,
then there can be a second class that goes deeper into other technologies
like that. But for any of those the person is going to need the same
background that would be taken by at least half the class, namely
configuring/managing Linux and Apache.

I know you said that this would be a class for those who had already taken
a Linux admin class. That's good. But understand that to be (in my opinion)
really ready for Corporate life, one needs to understand Apache rather
well, and understand how Apache interacts with the O/S like Linux rather
well. A Web Technologies class by itself wouldn't give enough depth to such
a requirement, I think. It would be like teaching someone the basics of SQL
and then saying "Okay, since you understand SQL itself, you can now manage
a MySQL server" or something like that. It's good starter material, but you
want more. And the companies that these folks hope to get hired by want
more. So in that case, I think a 3rd semester would be good. You can then
give them deeper experience in a few of the technologies. I.e. they can
learn about Ruby on Rails using Hadoop, or NodeJS using Msql or something.
The number of possible permutations are quite large. :)


Anyway, that's how I feel. Take it as you need/want it. :)
--- Dan

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