Now, I'm just starting PHP. I acknowledge that but it might be interesting for those who have never touched on the language before to hear my early impressions of it.
First of all, coming from Java it was very easy to adapt to the PHP syntax. It's extremely similar for the most part and I've gotten on well with the compiler so far, it's been intuitive all the way through. One thing that I'm not sure about at this stage is the IDE however. I'm currently using Dreamweaver to write my code, which feels a bit strange. I was using PHPEclipse before, which offered much more features but I'm finding Dreamweaver friendlier for now. It's also superior for when you are laying out tables and such in tandem with your code. (In fairness, these are probably two pass times that should be kept separate but this is what is working for me right now.)
Database stuff has also been very straight forward, dealing with the resultant arrays and collections, fine. I can't say anything within the language was cumbersome. I have also worked with the graphics manipulation library (GD) and it's powerful and easy to use. No complaints here either.
One part that I'm yet to fully throw myself into however is OO in PHP. So far I have an object handling my session logic but other than that I haven't gone into it. It's something that I'll definitely be using in the back end calculations. (Going into that stuff procedurally would take years off my life.) Anywho, while the manner in which you must access object variables seems a bit funky looking nothing seems too far out there.
It might be time to get my PHP book back off my friend... But all in all PHP is a damn pleasant language to work with, so far.
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