[FAQ] The tools of the trade

April 7, 2008

Editors

Editors are very much about personal choice - There are lots to choose from, although I personally recommend syntax highlighting editors. They can pick up mistakes before testing or compiling code.

Under MS Windows, my personal favorite was EditPlus, although under unix I use GEdit (part of the Gnome Suite)

Browsers

Again browsers are a bit of a personal thing, but really FireFox is IMO, the best. With several great extensions like WebDeveloper - worth it's weight in gold to any web designer - it's just an all round great product.

Manuals

Okay, so I admit it... I'm a closet manual reader. I refer back to a lot of manuals and have read them all through thoroughly several times. You may occasionally see people suggesting you RTFM -- Read the frakking manual!!! - I say RATFM - Read *ALL* the frakking manual.

Anyway, what you need here is of course the PHP manual, the MySQL manual, CSS and (X)HTML manuals and perhaps even a JavaScript Manual.

Yes, I know it's a lot of reading material, but trust me, it's worth it in the long run.

Coffee

You think I'm joking? I live on strong coffee when I get my serious programming head on... :D Get a good one though - nice rich dark turkish is ideal for around 5am...

A local server

This is without a doubt *the* best way to work - none of this download files... edit... upload... - try it all on your own computer first.

For windows there's two big solutions that I'm aware of: WampServer and XAMPP. and for Linux/Unix of course we all use Apache + PHP + MySQL. The two windows solutions are complete - everything built in, the unix people... well hopefully you'll find them pretty easy to install.

I've not looked at the windows solutions for a while, although I believe they are well supported and are easy to install.

Running a local server gives you great facilities - testing code locally, experimenting, it's all there at your fingertips and nobody but you can see the results.

References