Help Bigred Nerd Out

[Galapogos]

That looks like a decent tutorial. I've always like the W3Schools stuff I've come across, too, so I bet they have a good one as well. A couple of other quick links you'll want to bookmark:

PHP: PHP Manual - Manual -- documentation about everything in PHP. It's great if you need to find a function and then figure out how to use it.

MySQL :: MySQL 5.5 Reference Manual -- The documentation for MySQL, also great for looking up specific SQL syntax.

What he said. I use those two pages for references all the time at work.

Also, don't use an excel spreadsheet (you'll end up using CSV but same thing for your purposes) a database is what you want even on a very small scale.

Also, I don't agree with what daven said about PHP. It doesn't matter how big of a site you're making to determine what language you will use. The language is based off the preference of the coder and what apps you may need to interface with. Facebook is run off PHP, that's a pretty big fucking site.

Use PHP and mysql because they're both open source and you will have way less headaches with them.

[d0zer]

What he said. I use those two pages for references all the time at work.

Also, don't use an excel spreadsheet (you'll end up using CSV but same thing for your purposes) a database is what you want even on a very small scale.

Also, I don't agree with what daven said about PHP. It doesn't matter how big of a site you're making to determine what language you will use. The language is based off the preference of the coder and what apps you may need to interface with. Facebook is run off PHP, that's a pretty big fucking site.

Use PHP and mysql because they're both open source and you will have way less headaches with them.

This is true, but facebook has had to leverage a lot of c++ and a myriad of other technologies under the covers to overcome the inevitable performance limitations of PHP.

It's highly unlikely bigred will run into any of these limitations so this discussion is largely academic, but I'm pretty confident that you won't find any extremely performance-dependent webapp written entirely in PHP, or any other strictly interpreted language. It could probably handle a basic front-end serving up data from some sort of data warehouse, but anything computationally intensive wouldn't want the overhead of PHP.

C++ vs. Python vs. Perl vs. PHP performance benchmark « /contrib/famzah