UBB.Developers Forums Community Development Programming PHP and Server-side Scripting Beginner needs a lil help please

Well I managed to get a new harddrive for my older machine, so now it's up and running, but sans internet connection. I'd like to use the machine to improve my perl skills, as well as mysql and php. So, I'm currently d'ling Active Perl for Windows, (running win 98 on the machine), I was thinking about apache, but not sure, anything else it would be a good idea to get? (since I'm going to download a bunch of stuff and burn to a cd)..
I'm not totally sure where to start, so any advice, tips, etc would be good.

http://code.box.sk

You can download + read the books, and the tutorials section is GREAT for "Ok, how can (Hashes etc) be cool?". Download a decent code editor (there's an old topic down in chit-chat that had 1001 reccomendations) and have fun!

If you are looking into the realm of learning to develop cgi applications on that box, then by all means go with Activestate's Perl, Apache for win, php 4, and mysql.

Apache runs just fine on windows (though better as a service on win2k or NT), and is a far easier (IMO) envrionment to develop on. The windows version of Apache is questionable (stability-wise) for a production environment, but for dev I've never had ANY issues. Since apache is the most popular web server, it's best to learn that from the start. IIS just annoys me (others feel very differently about that -Cal :D- but Apache is the defacto standard)

PHP is much easier to setup on windows, as is mysql. Click install. That's about 99.9% of it.

My windows box runs Perl 5.6.0, Apache 1.3.14, mod_perl 1.24, PHP 4.04pl1, and MySQL 3.23.33 with no problems, and all of it was a cinch to get in and running.

Perl modules are very easy to install, using Activestate's ppm script. When that doesn't work (no module available in their ppd format), I downloaded nmake which works just like make on unix, and I just install the modules like on a normal unix box.

I far prefer Unix enviros, but it's much easier for me to develop on my win box (using my tools) and move my stuff over to unix when done.

--mark
--mark

Thanks, that's exactly the kind of thing I needed to hear.. As I said, I'm planning to just use that machine to learn on, as it doesn't matter if I accidentally screw stuff up, randomly break things, etc.. And it will never run as anything other than a standalone machine.. While I know pieces here and there of both perl and php, I have future projects planned in which I need a far better working knowledge of such stuff, so it's time for me to play around a lot .

Thanks for the advice guys.