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I’ve had quite a few people ask me this question: “Should I learn PHP and MySQL?”.

The answer is never easy. It all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Are you looking to be involved in your own website? Is it being run on PHP and MySQL? What would you like to do with your website?

There’s a million questions you can ask yourself. I, personally, believe that anyone who wants to become more involved with their own website or run their own Web Design and Development Company should, at the minimum, learn the basics of PHP and MySQL.

Why should you? Well, let’s take a few examples…

Maybe you want to create a Members are on your site and you want to be able to offer downloads, use a more interactive Contact script, show information dynamically for your customers (i.e. Time and Date, Their personal information, the information they searched for last, Billing information, Download history, username and/or password, etc) to make it easier for them to browse through your site.

Maybe you want to be able to use PHP for your Search Engine Optimization needs? Needs such as 404 Redirects, 301 redirects, etc.

Maybe you need to create a built in search system for your e-commerce site? Maybe you’re looking to simply redirect people to an Affiliate program?

See the many, MANY ways you can use PHP? It’s a very valuable tool to know and understand. Imagine yourself having the knowledge to take a product like Wordpress and fully customize it to your own, personal, needs?

Think you can make money off of one of your Wordpress Plugin Ideas by knowing PHP? Think you can build a better Content Management System than what’s currently available? What about a new Social Networking Script - OR Community?

Companies like PHPFox have made a killing with their php knowledge. Likewise for companies such as Mambo, vBulletin and various other scripts that you can purchase.

So the next question would be HOW you can learn PHP?

There’s a million ways to learn but I try to explain to everybody that watching Videos and DOING the coding practices they ask you to do is how you’ll learn quickly.

Sure… lot’s of people have learned PHP by reading books. But I find the problem with books is a lack of support. You’re always going to learn more by seeing and doing rather than reading and doing. Luckily there are solutions to this problem.

You can also visit popular forums such as Sitepoint, Digitalpoint and other Webmaster related forums or communities that allow other members to help with questions and answers.

No matter what you choose to do - just remember that DOING is how you learn. Practice without reading or watching. Just take the little knowledge you have at the time and make it grow with practice.

I hope you figure out what you need to accomplish and good luck!

Want to learn PHP at rapid speed? Check out these awesome Video Tutorials I’ve found!

If you’re looking to become a PHP programmer - you need to see these videos!

Choosing between LINUX web hosting and Windows hosting is a daunting task. You should know the language of your website, before determining which platform or which type of server you need. Linux hosting is best suitable for a simple HTML site or an ecommerce site or a site with any other programming-database feature created in php-MySql. If your site is in ASP, or ASP.NET, then you need to be on Windows servers.

Now what exactly are ASP.NET, PHP and MySQL web hosting? Let us delve further into these terms.

ASP.NET web hosting: Marketed by Microsoft, ASP.NET is a division of Microsoft’s .NET platform and a successor of Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. ASP.NET is a set of Web application development technologies that programmers can use to build dynamic applications, Web sites, and XML Web services.

ASP.NET web hosting cuts down the number of codes and makes building web application much easier. It gives more flexibility to the choice of language by supporting multiple .NET languages. In ASP.NET web hosting, as the source code and HTML are together, the pages are easy to write and maintain. Because of the built-in configuration information, registration of components is not necessary. ASP.NET application is faster and can face a large number of users with a consistency of performance.

PHP web hosting: PHP is a recursive initialism for PHP : Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP is a reflective programming language or a general-purpose server-side scripting language used for web development, i.e. creating dynamic and interactive websites. It can be planted into HTML code. PHP is frequently used together with APACHE on various operating systems mostly LINUX.

PHP acts more like a filter, running on a web server, taking inputs from a stream or file containing text and PHP instructions and displays a different stream of data. PHP is deployable in most operating systems, servers and platforms free of cost.

MySQL web hosting: MySQL is a multi-user, multithreaded computer language designed for management and retrieval of data, database object access control management and database schema creation and modification. It is a SQL database management system with 10 million installations. It is popular for web application, for open-source bug tracking tools and acts as the database component of WAMP, MAMP and LAMP. MySQL is closely related to PHP and Ruby on Rails. Most of the well known sites like Wordpress run on a combination of PHP and MySQL.

Now that you are more familiar with ASP.NET web hosting, PHP and MySQL web hosting, it may prove fruitful in your selection of server type.