Warning: regular expressions can become addictive.  And, for some of us 
batch manipulation of large text sets can provide a whole lot of 
satisfaction.  Finally, I never would have put the strings "PHP" and 
"sexiness" in a sentence together (though I guess I just did).

-t

On 3/25/10 4:46 PM, Ethan Gruber wrote:
> 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.
>>