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Originally published at Internet.comIntroduction
The last piece of Web development I did before traversing the wild road of upper management was back in 1997, building Java UI components for a small company's product line of components for developers. That was when applets were all the rage, mostly because of the total freedom given to the developer for creating a dynamic UI within a Web browser. Before that, I spent three years developing HTML pages and CGI scripts with Perl. I felt like the King of the World, where the Web was my domain and I knew all the tricks.
Jason Purdy
A lot can change in four years! Now that I've been beaten out of management (it's hard to get the love of coding out of your system) and shaken out of the .com arena (not so crazy about those 12-hour days and little reward), I find myself back in the Web development game, surrounded by years of evolutionary momentum that I have not kept up with: DHTML, PHP, JavaScript, XML, J2EE, ASP/JSP, .NET and more.
So why the column? How can I help you? Well, that's a good question. For you experts out there, I may not have the advice with tons of experience behind it that you're looking for. However, I notice that there's a gap for beginners/novices that are trying to work their way up to becoming experts. Some experts have a tendency to respond with "RTFM" to what they perceive as stupid (or malformed) questions. I'm not saying that this is wrong (I've seen my share of stupid questions and have asked some of them myself) but that there's room for someone at the intermediate level to listen to the questions, do the research (RTFMs) and answer the questions. That's my goal, my mantra, my purpose. While PHP doesn't have Perl's linguistic pleasantries, it is pretty similar; if you know Perl, learning PHP is easy...
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