Andy Chase

As anyone looking for a PHP programming job in the current economy knows, those jobs are few and far between. That's a problem if that happens to be the only language you know.

There are plenty of people, CTOs and CIOs included, who are quick to dismiss PHP (PHP's not a "Real" language) because

• It's not PERL
• It's not ASP
• It's not JSP
• It's not ColdFusion
• It's very easy to learn; easy enough that there are a lot of self-styled "PHP Programmers" out there writing sloppy, insecure, and unmaintainable code because they've only gotten as far as learning mechanics.

I should know about that last one, because that was me when I first got into PHP; it's really easy to begin peppering HTML pages with an echo statement here and a for loop there, and then maybe you decide to try hooking up with a MySQL database so you just stick the password right in the same file, and before you know if you've got a big kludgey mess. It works, but it's just as much of a pain to maintain as a static HTML page.

Getting a handle on PHP's OOP features was probably the single biggest milestone for me. Apart from leading to much neater, better organized code it also familiarized me with the style and terminology that many "Real" Object-Oriented languages use, to the point where Java has finally begun to make sense to me.

I'm also learning Python, which is a damn elegant language but for which there's even less advertised demand than PHP. The thing I find most encouraging is that I'm finding the learning curve for both Java and Python significantly shorter than I did as recently as two years ago... When I first started with PHP I was most concerned with the hows of piecing a script together, but I think I've since made the leap to understanding the whys of organizing code in certain ways. The whys are ultimately more important, because it makes it a lot easier to apply concepts from one language to another. It's sort of like learning one Romance language and suddenly realizing that the others are very similar in a lot of ways.