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Don't worry. PHP itself shouldn't be an issue. It's bog standard ALGOL-y syntax with some weird corner cases that aren't that hard to avoid. The bigger gotcha
by CamTin 11y ago
Don't worry. PHP itself shouldn't be an issue. It's bog standard ALGOL-y syntax with some weird corner cases that aren't that hard to avoid.
The bigger gotcha will be getting used to the execution model, if it's standard LAMP-y type application hacking. Remember that, in this style of app, all of your state has to be either explicitly stored in a backend or in the browser cookies. The script begins not knowing anything, lives briefly, excreting HTML or JSON, and then dies, leaving behind only what it's explicitly saved. In some ways it's more complex than a Rails-type model, and in others it's simpler.
In any case, you should be up to speed in a week or two of hacking at it full time.
- eli 11y agoAren't there pretty popular PHP frameworks that take care of magic like parsing variables and routing URLs and persisting state?
- krapp 11y agoOf course, tons. But there's also a lot of PHP out there that doesn't use frameworks. Knowing how things like sessions and headers and requests actually work is probably more immediately useful for PHP than other languages, for which there's likely one de facto framework that everyone uses by default. In PHP-land you're just as likely to walk into a job where interns have been hacking crazy stuff into a Simple Machines forum for the last year as encounter something built on a framework. And of course, mixing javascript, css and php together with whatever happens to come out of a database query (which is encoded in who knows what) is not at all uncommon, so even frontend knowledge is helpful.