i'm currently looking into different forum softare to add to my site. I wanted to get opinons of the learning curve and worth while of learning perl and using perl based forums or learning php/sql and using forum solution based on it? I have no knowledge of perl and/or php and only basic sql skill.
Chris
Perl vs. PHP/MySql
I suggest learning and using both and believe they are in the same class as far as being easy to learn and both provide similar functionality. The reason I would say learn both is because there is a wealth of good code for both. Of course you probably would rather start learning just one. For web based user interface type of stuff I slightly prefer PHP. For more underlying OS type of scripting I slightly prefer Perl, however both can be used for either. Both can be used as a scripting language but PHP is more commonly used as a module in Apache. To use perl for web interface programming you need to write your code as CGI scripts (unless you want to use Apache's mod_perl). I believe it is much more common to use PHP these days over mod_perl. I guess that doesn't really answer your question. I would suggest you start with PHP if you want to do web interface scripting. I believe both are easy to learn.