[SWLUG] Programming language for a dummy

[David Scourfield]

Personally, I found PHP really easy to learn for web development stuff.  
The online documentation at php.net is very thorough indeed, and the 
official tutorial is, in my opinion, very good to work through to get a 
grip of the language itself.

PHP also has a CLI environment so you can write scripts to run from the 
command line.  I've not used this extensively, but it's pretty much the 
same as its web development version.  I also think PHP has very easy to 
use file handling functions.  For example, a file can be read entirely 
into a string variable using one function "file_get_contents()" or 
alternatively into an array where each array element is one line of the 
file using the function "file()".  These can make parsing and 
pattern-matching on a whole file or line-by-line basis respectively very 
easy indeed.

I like PHP :-)

Dai