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I am new to PHP, what exactly is it good for?


yakoup46

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no.  regex is just a small part of php.  You can be really skilled at php and not really know a whole lot about regex. Regex is pattern matching, data mining.  It is a big part of things like crawler bots, search engines, page scrapers, etc... But things like that are just one aspect of the whole internet mechanics.  There is more than plenty of stuff to do as a web developer that has nothing to do with regex.  As mentioned, most people generally try to avoid it, go their whole career only knowing basics, if anything at all.

 

I personally get off to it.  But that's me.  I like picking shit apart and finding patterns in things.

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Something that I hope the OP has figured out is that the term 'dynamic' means something different whether it's used to describe client-side or server-side design.

 

With the client-side (read: JavaScript), 'dynamic' tends to mean interactive.  You click on a button, or move the mouse over a certain element, and something changes immediately without a page refresh.

 

With the server-side (read: PHP, Python, Perl, ASP.NET, Ruby, etc), 'dynamic' means being able to serve content based on some user-submitted value.  It's not immediately interactive, as it requires a request to be sent to the server, that request to be analyzed and processed by the script running on the server, and the results sent back to the browser.  This requires (in most cases) the page to be refreshed, or another page to be loaded.

 

Database-driven sites are considered 'dynamic' because they facilitate this behavior.  The user clicks a link whose URL has a query string, or submits a form, and the proper information is retrieved from the database to populate the next page.  An example of this behavior can be seen with this forum.

 

So, why is that termed 'dynamic' if the results aren't immediate?  In the dark ages of the internet most sites were static HTML pages with the data hard-coded into each page's markup.  These were mostly unpleasant times that we should never speak of again.

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