In the Beginning...

So I am trying to get back into the swing of PHP web development. I know very little PHP right now even though I have dabbled a bit into it about a year ago. I feel like knowing how to do web development is a great skill to have. My skills will increase and I will have a greater skill set to work with. I can show employers, friends, and family the projects I work on and they will be so impressed ;) Plus, I think doing some PHP development will be a bit of fun.

Why do Web Development with PHP?

I was talking with a friend who is a big proponent of PHP and I mentioned to him that I was thinking about using ruby or ruby on rails to do some web development. I thought ruby would be something nice to learn because a local company here in Provo, UT, mondeydesktop.com, is a big ruby user. I thought, "Hey, I can learn ruby on the side for fun and if I ever need a job I can go work with moneydesktop.com." My friend dissuaded me from that idea and said that PHP was the best way to go. He told me how PHP is the fastest. I didn't understand because I thought that all interpreted languages are pretty slowly. Then he told me that Facebook created a compiler for PHP called Hiphop or something like that. So I thought, "What the heck? Why not use PHP?" I still have the desire to learn ruby and ruby on rails but for now I will stick with PHP.

Why do Web Development on a Mac?

I recently bought a Macbook Air from a guy at work and I love it. It is sleek, light, and fun to use. I use to do my PHP development on my HP laptop running Windows. I would install WAMP (Windows Apache MySQL and PHP) onto my Windows machine and I was good to go. Although my windows machine was great for development I didn't feel like using my huge mammoth-sized HP laptop anymore. So I decided to stick with my Macbook Air. So I downloaded MAMP (Mac Apache MySQL and PHP) and TextWrangler for my code editor and now I am good to go with a Mac. I am still trying to figure out a way to use Eclipse as my code editor. I hear there are some nice plugins for PHP development.

Miscellaneous Problems

My next comment will show how much of a noob I am when it comes to web development. I had this little tiny problem when I first started yesterday. When working with WAMP I placed all of my files in the www folder. So I looked to find out where I needed to place my PHP files so that I can run them through MAMP. I found out the location to place files was in the htdocs folder in the MAMP Applications folder. So I put a file in their and I went to Safari and typed in "localhost:8888/MAMP/htdocs" and I got NOTHING. I was perplexed because when I went to the MAMP start page it took me to "localhost:8888/MAMP/?language=English". So I naturally concluded that my files would be at "localhost:8888/MAMP/htdocs" which is incorrect. To access the files I had to go to "localhost:8888" and that's it.