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3:39pm on Tuesday, 15th June, 2010:
Anecdote
I recently decided that it's inconvenient not to know PHP, so today I installed a PHP interpreter.
Hmm, perhaps I should back up.
A few weeks ago I decided that it's inconvenient not to know PHP, so I installed a PHP interpreter, plus Apache plus MySQL. Then I bought a PHP textbook, which I started on today. It recommended using EasyPHP, an integrated solution, rather than the messiness of three separate systems that had to be beaten with a stick to get to talk to one another. I therefore uninstalled Apache and deleted PHP and MySQL, and tried out EasyPHP.
Ho hum. It seemed such a sensible decision when I made it.
I tried out two versions of EasyPHP, in fact, multiple times each. Some three or four hours later, I eventually concluded that it might well be easy on a 32-bit system, but on a 64-bit system with Microsoft's crazy file protection regime in place it was anything but. Rather than get out my stick to beat the individual versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP into shape again, I tried another WAMP: XAMPP. This, amazingly, ran straight away — it included the helpful facility to install it to its own directory, thereby avoiding the travails that follow when half the programs want to be in C:\Program Files and the other half want to be in C:\Program Files (x86).
Another half an hour of tracking around the Internet later and my test program finally worked. Turns out that although you can embed PHP in HTML, you have to give the file a .php extension rather than a .html extension for it to work. That would have been useful to know earlier.
Right, so now I'm all set up to learn PHP! Stupid people can use it, so it can't be that hard.
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Copyright © 2010 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).