Cate Serino wrote:
Dave Matusiak makes a very good point in suggesting teaching broader "programming principles" and the cross-learning benefits of PERL and PHP. They are quite similar, so much so that once you've become proficient in one, picking up the other is really a weekend activity. Your programming style will always stray towards which ever one you learned first, but you can definitely port those skills with out great difficulty.Hi Trilug members,
Let me begin that, I am a instructor and want to prepare my students in
the best way for the market place. I have the opprotunity to teach
either VB.net or PHP. Any thoughts on either platform. I know that I am speaking to a bias crowd, but please keep you comments to your thoughts
about the market place. Meaning do you think that the positions in
either PHP or vb.net will grow. Also any recomendations for books for
PHP. Any help would be great.
Many thanks,
Cate Serino
There's one other point that hasn't been made clearly yet. Learning VB.NET means you will be able to code something up to solve a problem in a Microsoft environment. Learning PHP is vastly more versatile, in that you can run PHP on top of IIS, Apache, or stand-alone in either environment. I have two good friends (poor blokes) who do PHP development mostly on Windows, and make a healthy living at it. I have yet to meet any commercial developers doing VB.NET code on Mono on a *NIX platform (if that's even possible, I'm not sure).
Suffice to say that VB.NET is a platform-specific skill. PHP is a broad skill that can be applied in most any work environment. That's not to say you're going to get hired in a VB.NET shop as a PHP programmer, but if you're hired as a general purpose programmer to accomplish a task, you've got a leg up if your skills are more likely to run on existing platforms. The same applies if your students don't end up becoming professional programmers, but stray more towards admin work, or HTML-focused web development work, or any other fields where programming isn't the primary focus, but you need to whack out some code from time to time. The more likely they can apply those skills to the platform they've chosen for other reasons, the better.
Aaron S. Joyner Admittedly and happily biased PERL/PHP programmer -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
