This post is part of my 30 days of geek challenge.

PHP > SEX

As much as this will make some of you gag and want to cause me physical pain (or more so than normal anyway) I have to admit to being a complete and utter PHP fanboy. :-O

Yes, PHP is quirky at times, but it’s fast, lightweight, easy to develop simple or complex systems with and has a huge number of useful functions and extensions.

I love it’s multi-dimensional hashes/associate arrays, it’s syntax style and the way it feels to write and engage with, it suits me just right. :-)

The other fantastic reason why I love PHP is the vast amount of resource information available online via php.net – being able to lookup any function and see not only the official documentation, but also hundreds of user submitted comments and examples is fantastic.

I’ve developed many major web application projects in PHP (these days mostly in object orientated MVC-style structures) including:

• Amberdms Billing System
• LDAPAuthManager
• Amberphplib (my custombuilt framework for web apps)

PHP has a bad rep for being “insecure” which is more a problem with stupid configurations (eg register_globals) or the fact that a lot of new programmers start with PHP and don’t always understand the security implications of developing for the web.

Aside from PHP, I’m pretty fluent with Perl (although I kind of hate it) and know bits of C/C++ although not enough to code anything that exciting, my C knowledge is mostly enough to fix a bug in some existing code or hack in a new feature in a simple application.

I want to expand my C++ knowledge and I’m considering looking at Java (for writing apps for Android) as well as possibly experimenting with Python, Ruby or one of these other new  cool languages that people are using. :-)