I have a mac, and I know that some of this book is PC based, will it be possible for me to use this book to learn PHP Apache, and MySQL?

Thanks,
Chris

I don't have the book myself, but I know PHP is installable on OS X, since it has the Linux base. Other than the differences in the installation process PHP can run on OS X like any other operating system. In fact with the Unix backend on OS X, it would probably run better! When installing anything just use the Linux instructions.

See:
http://developer.apple.com/internet/opensource/php.html
or http://www.phpmac.com/

You can do a Google search for further help:
http://www.google.com/search?q=PHP+Mac+OS+X

Regards,
Rich

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The Spicy Peanut Project
http://www.spicypeanut.net
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Thanks for the info, I'm just a little worried because with a quick glance at the book, I saw a few things in there that were PC specific so am a little worried about actually trying to go thru it...

Chris

Well I wouldn't be worried about it, they may show PC screenshots, but I'd say most PHP is platform independant, with the exception of a few select things. For instance, I use a Windows-based machine to develop, but my live server runs some flavor of Linux and with the exception of how file permissions are handled differently I haven't had to do anything special to get my scripts working on the Linux box. I think you'll be just fine! If you encouter an extension or example that requires something platform specific, chances are its well documented in the PHP manual anyway. Their installation examples probably focus on Windows, but there again, that's something that's easy to find help for. But not having read or even seen the book I couldn't comment on that side of it.

Regards,
Rich

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
The Spicy Peanut Project
http://www.spicypeanut.net
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The only place you'll really have a problem is where you make filesystem-specific calls. For example, paths on linux, unix, and OSX appear as "/path/to/file", whereas Windows uses "C:\\path\\to\\file". (Double backslashes are required in double quoted strings because the first backslash is the escape character for the second.)

If you need to use shell execution operations, like exec(), passthru(), or the backtick (`) operator, then your code will be OS-dependent. File uploads might also require some OS dependent code because of the path issues discussed above.


Take care,

Nik
http://www.bigaction.org/

Ok...last question, for Nikolai...For someone that is just starting out on PHP, MySQL, and Apache, is this a doable thing for me to learn with these "bugs" in the book for my computer?

Chris

Yeah, shouldn't be a problem. If you're learning the language, you can configure PHP to act like the default configuration of older versions. Simply set register_globals "on" and error_reporting "E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE", and everything from the book *should* work.

Take all your lessons with grains of salt -- the purpose of introductory books is usually to become familiarized with the most useful built-in functions, the language syntax/semantics, etc. Once you have a basic understanding of what PHP can (and can't) do, then you can revisit the original exercises and understand where they might be poor solutions to real-world problems.

In order to learn any language, you must learn simple basics and often have to make naive assumptions about many of the more complicated issues to achieve a solid understanding in the fundamentals. Then you can build on those fundamentals and gain understanding in the more complex design areas.

Building software is usually an iterative process. One can only assume that learning to build it must also be an iterative process.


Take care,

Nik
http://www.bigaction.org/

I don't think this book has the register_globals 'bug' as its fairly new, in fact the few examples of code that I've seen from it use superglobals, so that shouldn't be a problem at all. There was one error in the book that Elizabeth, one of the authors, posted to this forum, its the sticky topic.

Yeah file paths are an easily recognizable thing, as Nik pointed out Windows have a drive letter and backslashes whereas OS X, Linux, aren't appended with a drive letter and have forward slashes.

In real world practice one would use abstraction techniques to avoid hard-coding a file path whenever possible. Though I can't really comment on it, this is probably not the case in the book, as abstraction techniques sometimes obfuscate things for the beginner. But again that sort of thing is easily recognizable. I'd get the book, if you don't like it you can always return it, right?

Regards,
Rich

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The Spicy Peanut Project
http://www.spicypeanut.net
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Alright, I'm a little late to this party...

PHP+Apache+MySQL should run just fine on OS X (it sure runs like a champ on my iBook).

If you haven't discovered it yet, OS X comes with apache and PHP installed out-of-the-box (albeit older versions...but they should work just fine). Installing MySQL wasn't difficult to boot, but it is a manual process.

The only thing that should need to change in the example book code is (as mentioned above) the file paths.

-- Jason