[HomeMac] Programming question

[Charles Turner]

On May 31, 2004, at 7:15 AM, Home Macintosh Users List wrote:

> Date: Sun, 30 May 2004 12:48:13 -0700
> From: Thom Holland <tholland at san.rr.com>
> Subject: Programming question
>
> Hi all,
>
> I want to start programming for my Mac, but I don't know where to
> start.  Specifically, I want to write something that will track my
> automobile expenses and also to sync between my Mac and my PDA.

If you are running OSX and feel comfortable with the command prompt, 
then there are several programming packages already built-in. PERL has 
been mentioned. OSX (in 10.3 anyway) also has PHP, Python, and Ruby. In 
fact there also are Java and the whole Apple developer's environment if 
you want it. Using those, however, is beyond my experience.

My current project is developing a few dynamic www pages using PHP with 
MySQL. I'm doing it all under Panther using the Apache web server, etc. 
I needed to install MySQL and the PERL interface to MySQL. Both of 
those installs went pretty smoothly, much more so than some of the 
software installs I've done on other "old line" unix systems.

I used to think that PHP was just for www programming. However, I've 
learned that it runs just as well as a shell script and can be used for 
ordinary programming and system administration too. As a learning 
project I'm rewriting a few thing in PHP that I had originally written 
in PERL. So far PHP seems just as pleasant to work with, and as 
powerful.

There is plenty of documentation on the www which can easily be found 
using Google or the like. I book I recently bought is good too: "PHP 
Essentials, 2nd Edition" by Julie Meloni.

-ct