Ask HN: How do I learn LAMP? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do I learn LAMP?

3 pointsfrapbot10 comments

I need your help HN. I'm a new developer and I need to learn everything about LAMP for a business project. How do I do it?

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I'd go so far as to say it's impossible to learn it everything about the LAMP stack - the four elements involved are vast and complex, not to mention you'll also need to learn HTML, CSS, JS, and design if you're not contracting the front-end work to someone else. But fortunately, you don't need to.

Pay for a hosting account with a reliable and reputable company. That takes care of the Linux, MySQL installation and most of the Apache stuff.

You'll need to learn some Apache configuration things if you're using fancy URLs, security or caching but that's it. You can be up to speed in a few days with a good book.

The PHP side and the SQL side (DBA side really) are more tricky. It depends on you. If you're a tinkerer, just read tutorials and start changing the source in open projects. Learn by doing. If you're a reader, buy two O'Reilly books - one about PHP and a PHP cookbook. If you need hand-holding, get on Treehouse or Khan's Academy. Whatever route you choose though, try to find a mentor - having someone you can email occasionally with those "WTF have I done? This should be working!" questions is so, so useful. You'll learn much faster.

Philosophically though, and only in my opinion, learning LAMP in order to complete a single project is a waste of your time. Pay a contractor. The project will succeed if you spend time on it in useful ways - learning the tech basics is not a good use of that time. And you might not like it, or be competent at it, or be capable of coding it if it's especially complicated - I've been a developer for 15 years and I still run away from some particularly difficult coding jobs. As a complete amateur you aren't in a position to know what you're getting in to - someone with experience would be able to evaluate the proposition, and see the potential pitfalls, far better than you.

This is basically what I have to accomplish:

Take a CSV file containing logs and crawl through it. Log snippets should be linked to specific links (in this case, solutions). Generate an output (another csv with the links added).

So the project entails specifically this, beyond just learning LAMP, this will help you focus on your PHP research:

> Take a CSV file containing logs and crawl through it.

google this: PHP parse Log Files

> Log snippets should be linked to specific links (in this case, solutions)

so you need to use Regex (probably using preg_match()) to locate certain string occurrences in the log file and use a look-up table of solutions (if it is small could be a hard coded array, if it is big probably a MySQL Table.)

> generate output

either echo results enclosed in <pre> tags with or with appropriate header() options...

That's it basically. Good Luck

Start:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundle) Simple: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/web-designer/how-to-set-up-...

or simpler: http://www.wikihow.com/Create-a-LAMP-Server-Using-Ubuntu

also easy: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ApacheMySQLPHP

Do you have any book recommendations I can gobble up? I prefer learning through reading a lot of books then trying them in the real world.

A server stack is more than just LAMP, and what you need to learn is more than just a book covers. Try setting it up first, develop some small applications and see if you can do what you want to do.

The LAMP guide at Linode Library gives a step-by-step procedure: https://library.linode.com/lamp-guides

Perhaps check out http://teamtreehouse.com/library/the-treehouse-show/episode-... as a jumping off point.. if you're on a Mac

Are you aware what is LAMP?

Yes. I just need a little guidance on what's the best way to start learning.

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