: I am currently at the intermediate stage of HTML. I would like to get a lot better at the whole web design thing but there is just seemingly to much to cover. I would like to get to the point where I can create professional business web sites. I would like to be able to create sites with general databases, registered user databases, message boards, shopping carts CGI programs and so on and so on. When I start to study topics like this I get led from html to xhtml, to asp, and then to perl and php, and from there to SQL and then to java and on to java script. It's really starting to get to big and I don't know what to study. Can I please get some feedback on the fewest needed languages that I can use and get the best benefit? Thanks all.
: O, and what is the difference between Perl and PHP?
: One more thing, can I use C++ to create CGI programs, that is if I could write in C++.
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Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) is a full general purpose programming language, which can also be used for CGI programming.
PHP is a hypertext preprocessor and is embedded into the html as tags, which are replaced by the server with html.
Of course you can write CGI programs in C++. You can also write them in Delphi, VB, Pascal, assembly, etc. Any fully developed language can be used to write CGI programs. The problem with many older languages is the lack of CGI routine libraries, which means you need to write everything yourself, including the communication with the webserver.