Development Tools

To actually design and maintain your website, you will need to use some software tools. Throughout this site, I will recommend various resources relevant to the topic under discussion, but here I am referring to the basics of writing and maintaining your code. Essentially, there are three basic types of tools you will rely on: code tools, server tools and transfer tools[ Read more ]

Terms and Other Things to Know

I will be using some terms in the rest of this book that you may or may not already be familiar with. Read through this section before continuing to be sure.

  • Spider / robot (bot) – A spider or robot (usually just called bot) is a program that is used to visit websites to gather information (though some bots

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Other Popular Development Tools

The LAMP platform is the focus of this material but there are some other popular development tools you may come across in your work that I will not be discussing here and at present know fairly little about. These include:

  • Microsoft IIS
  • .ASP
  • .JSP
  • .CFM
  • Java

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Whither PHP?

“Heavy-duty computer-science folks tend to get frustrated with scripting languages because they’re not precise,” says Rasmus Lerdorf, an engineer at Yahoo and inventor of the PHP language. “But for someone who has a lot of work to do and needs to go home on Friday afternoon, it just works.”

Lerdorf, a native of Denmark, started PHP in 1994 to make it easier for novice programmers to … [ Read more ]

Useful Code Snippets / Tutorials

Occasionally I come across useful sample code or tutorials. Many of these I don’t actually end up using, but since they are useful for learning or possibly for a future use, I save them.