a note i made to myself a while back when first going thru the
online PHP manual, so i thought i'd put it out there and let others
ignore it at their leisure.
i find the order of the two early sections -- "getting started" and
"installation and configuration" -- a bit backwards since that earlier
section assumes that PHP is, somehow, running to some extent as it
gives the reader some samples to test.
as an alternative, it would seem to make more sense to have the
installation chapter first, but start it off with a prelim section
along the lines of, "is PHP already installed and can i skip the rest
of this chapter?" because i'm guessing that numerous linux distros
will, if the web server is installed, also have PHP installed and
ready to go. so before getting into *any* installation, it would save
the reader a pile of time to have a quick checklist of what to look
for to verify that PHP is on the system and behaving properly.
and, to that end, a bit more complicated, but it might be worth
expanding on what might or might not be installed depending on what
you want to use PHP for. for instance, the manual currently talks
about PHP being used for 3 purposes:
* server-side (web) scripting
* command line scripting
* desktop (GUI) applications
but depending on what you want it for, you may not have to install
everything. for instance, if you want only command-line scripting, on
fedora, you need install only the "php-cli" package, and so on. so
one could write a short section explaining that, for which one would
have to verify only that, on linux, you have the "php" utility
installed.
if you wanted to go further and do server-side web scripting, then
there are more packages to install and verify. you get the idea.
in any event, it would seem to make more sense to start things off
by just asking the reader to look at his/her current system, run some
commands to see what's there and, if they're lucky, conclude that
they're all set to go and can skip the rest of the install chapter.
thoughts?
rday
