If one's interests were digital library data curation and migration, the
most useful things to know would be XSLT, bash scripting, Perl, and
knowledge of regular expressions.  I've done a lot of migration with bash
scripting, regular expressions, and XSLT alone, without the need for Perl,
but Perl or SAX would be useful in migrating non-XML or invalid XML/SGML.  I
used simple, iterative scripts to migrate thousands of TEI files from TEI
Lite to a more consistent schema.  I've done similar things to go from a 500
page HTML thumbnail gallery of manuscripts into an EAD guide.   Roy is right
in stating there is more to programming than web pages.  A lot of dirty work
behind the scenes in libraries is done without the sexiness of PHP or Ruby
on Rails applications.

Ethan

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 4:36 PM, Genny Engel <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Agreed -- I coded up many nice SQL injection vulnerabilities before I ever
> learned PHP.  As for Perl, anyone remember the notorious formmail.cgi from
> Matt's Script Archive?
>
> For **web** programming specifically, it's critically important for newbies
> to get a grounding in security issues, regardless of the language being
> used.  Also, in usability issues, accessibility issues, etc. .... for
> anything that's actually going to get used by the public.  But really, that
> mainly applies if you're going to be developing a whole app complete with
> web-accessible front end.
>
> If your interests aren't particularly in web development, you have a whole
> other set of potential issues to learn about, and I'm probably ignorant of
> most of them.
>
> My first language was C, which according to langpop.com [1] is still the
> most popular language around!  If you don't want to get bogged down in the
> web security issues, etc., then you might lean toward learning a
> general-purpose language like C or Java, rather than one designed for a
> specific purpose as PHP is for web development.
>
>
> [1] http://www.langpop.com/
>
>
> >>> [log in to unmask] 03/25/10 07:56AM >>>
> On 3/24/2010 17:43, Joe Hourcle wrote:
> > I know there's a lot of stuff written in it, but *please* don't
> > recommend PHP to beginners.
> >
> > Yes, you can get a lot of stuff done with it, but I've had way too many
> > incidents where newbie coders didn't check their inputs, and we've had
> > to clean up after them.
>
> Another way of looking at this: part of learning a language is learning
> its vulnerabilities and how to deal with them.  And how to avoid
> security holes in web code in general.
>