Server-Side Scripts and Other Dark Arts

Website Development is sometimes divided into two camps: the design afficianados who love to make wireframes, wield Photoshop and choose fonts; and the code wizards who have crossed the divide from XHTML, CSS even Jquery and Jscripts and have journeyed to the borderlands of PHP, ASP and server side scripts.

To some of us, coders are an obscure lot, clothed in mystery and arcane knowledge. Their incantations protect against SQL Injection Attacks, conjure variables from contact forms and deliver the contents to Webmasters' emails.  Since it is based on C, it allows its creator to go beyond server-side scripting, and create client-side GUI applications that work on most platforms. For many of us it causes the knee-locking terror usually saved for advanced math.

Recently, I needed to implement a reliable contact form along with a form processing script. Unfamiliar with the shadowlands of php, the project held all the appeal of a root canal. Anyone who knows me will affirm that I am not a quitter. I think of this as a positive trait: perseverence. My friends and family, though tend to describe it as obsessive compulsive disorder and find it annoying...The bottom line is, that I read blogs, took tutorials, scanned scripts, wrote and tested and pulled out enough hair to contribute to Locks of Love. In the end, I produced a contact form that not only functioned properly, but fit well into the website I was working on.

Some of the sites I found useful were:

NFriedly Tech Blog, Daaq net, YouTube, New Think Tank, and the W3CSchools. A little spin on your favorite search engine will reward you with numerous sites willing to share: information, free downloads and troubleshooting. In my opinion, it is worth taking the time to sift through the piles of information to gain a foothold in Php. I hold with the old saying :


    Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.