UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi all,

I must create a web page but I have no idea (yet) of writing html or php, so right now I'm lost in a bunch of acronyms and languages, and I don't know which one should I start to learn... so please, could you give me a recommendation?

The visitor to my web page should select an starting and ending date in a drop down list; these dates should be passed to a script; the script must select the data from an ascii database (a temporal evolution of a given parameter) and write the selected data in a new file; this new file should be plotted (with gnuplot); and finally the plots should be published in the website.

Right now it seems impossible to me, but I think I will struggle through these steps AT LEAST if I know where I have to start!!! )) Should I use html with cgi? Does it worth to learn perl, or awk is enough? Should I start with html or php? MySQL?

Thanks from a (absolutely) confused newbie!!!

Well I guess you need to find out the relative strengths & weaknesses of these technologies and match them to your needs accordingly... I'm not a web expert, but I know we have done this type of thing with perl+cgi+html. Personally I am using shell scripts rather than Perl; but this is purely so that I can improve my native scripting skills. From what I understand Perl is the shtuff for text-processing and provides good abstraction from some tricky scripting stuff, so you might wanna go Perl rather than shell scripts.

Also, Perl is definitely worth learning if you will be doing this kind of thing at all in the future. And remember, most people don't know where to start - just take baby steps until it either comes together or falls apart (in which case you may need to try some different tech; or post your problem here).

Thanks dan-e,

I'm actually starting to bit pieces of these languages on different websites, but maybe few of you have done this before and went through the steps before me... and your opinion is very helpful!

So thanks for your post!