I need a certain language

[Doug]

Forgive me for being ignorant but all of my websites were built with mainly html and very little php and I've just never had the time to learn anything new, well, now is the time. I want a language that is similar to visual basic or c++. What is the closest web programming language to that? I want to be able to say If<this> then <this> if you get what I mean. Any help would be great. Thanks

[KelliShaver]

PHP is probably the most similar, followed by perl.

[Selkirk]

Use PHP.

[AmbulanceBlues]

Yeah, I'm learning PHP right now and it's quite similar to the VBA I've used before. It's what all the cool kids are learning this year.

[KelliShaver]

Nah, the cool ones are learning Ruby. ;)

[AmbulanceBlues]

Since you brought it up, what is Ruby? (And what are her rails?) :)

[agua]

http://www.rubyonrails.org/

Its some sort of programming language - very streamline... I won't go into details (because I don't know them) - I'll leave that to Kelli :)

I did watch a video presentation the other day where they made a blog script in 15 mins with only 60 or so lines of code - its on the Ruby on the Rails website

Just found this introduction article: http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/StartAtTheBeginning

[The New Guy]

Ruby is a programming language. Rails is a framework. Huge difference. Ruby is not for the faint of heart, its is advanced OO langauge and not geared towards beginner's. I would recommend C# or PHP or if your looking for something with PHP speed but alittle more OO check out Python.

[AmbulanceBlues]

I read that article, and... Dang. I'll just stick with PHP for now.

[KelliShaver]

Ruby is not for the faint of heart, its is advanced OO langauge and not geared towards beginner's.

Quite true. Rails makes it easy to do a lot of simple things, but once you get deeper into Ruby it gets more complex and, for a lot of people, just getting into the mindset that Ruby requires can be tricky.

Personally, I'm really liking it, though it took me a long time of studying OO programming in general before things really started making any sense. I don't think I could have picked it up from scratch.

[Doug]

Thanks for the replies. How would I call something from a different page with PHP. What I mean is, say I have X on one page and I want something on another page to happen depending on the value of X. Can that be done with PHP?

[AmbulanceBlues]

Yeah. I'm just getting in to it, but:

1. Have a form field for X on the first page
2. The submit button of the form will call the second page, passing along the X variable as a "get" or a "post"
3. The second page will have an "if" or "if/else" statement (Or other means) for processing the information X passed along.
4. All of this will take place on the server before the page ever gets to the user
5. The user will only see what resulted from the PHP being processed.