I need to write my first script, where to start?

CSU

I'm asking for some advice on where to start learning to code for web applications, what language should I begin with that best suits PHP and MySQL driven applications in a MS environment?

I'd like to start by writing my first script and ask you guy's to help me as I go along

I'll start by writing a script for an e-commerce website of which the bare-bones are up and running on Joomla/virtuemart on my IIS 7 webserver. I don't want to use 3rd party modules and want to hand code all that needs doing.

The script needs to:

• Access the vendors FTP
• Download a CSV containing product info
• Insert or replace "YOURIDHERE" (my afilliate ID) into a field on every row
• Insert specific rows of the CSV into MySQL database (structure of original CSV and target database column's are different)

I could just throw money at it...but that just plain ol' boring.

Please help?

Liam Byrne

CSU wrote: »

I'm asking for some advice on where to start learning to code for web applications, what language should I begin with that best suits PHP and MySQL driven applications in a MS environment?

Well PHP is a language in itself, and MySQL has a query language, so those would be a good place to start given those requirements.

dueyfinster

Python has a class with methods for dealing with CSV and how they are laid out. Worth checking out...

Tom Dunne

CSU wrote: »

The script needs to:

• Access the vendors FTP
• Download a CSV containing product info
• Insert or replace "YOURIDHERE" (my afilliate ID) into a field on every row
• Insert specific rows of the CSV into MySQL database (structure of original CSV and target database column's are different)

The way I would approach it is as follows:

Get the FTP part working by performing the steps by hand (i.e. at the command prompt). Once you get that working, put it into a script (FTP /? is a good start )

Then wrap a Windows batch file around it and schedule the batch file via Windows Scheduler so it runs every day/night/whenever.

Once you have got your file, you can then perform the pre-processing via PHP prior to insertion into the database using SQL.

I don't know enough about PHP to say whether you can FTP directly from the language, maybe you can.

oeb

Tom Dunne wrote: »

I don't know enough about PHP to say whether you can FTP directly from the language, maybe you can.

There are a number of classes available to allow you to do this.
http://code.google.com/p/ftp-php/
http://www.phpclasses.org/package/3174-PHP-Client-to-access-FTP-servers-in-pure-PHP-code.html


That being said, the last time I had to do something similar to this, I just wrote the retriever in perl.