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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. >>