what is Perl, php, SSL, MySQL, MSSQL, CGI, FTP, and Bandwidth? what do they do? what are they for? thanx u all in advance!^_^

cgi/perl and php are server side programming languages. youc an do a lot with them - guestbook, news managers, etc.

ssl is a secure server, allows for credit card processing

mysql, mssql - database servers - often integrated with cgi/perl or php to create powerful programs, store information. ex: the data for the forums is stored in mysql.

ftp - a method of accessing your web hosting and putting files on it

bandwidth - the amount of data you are allowed to transfer each month

one little note is that Perl is a scripting language, but CGI is not. CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface (I'm 99.99% sure of that, anyway :)), and is really only a way of interfacing with a scripting language, such as Perl. so if you want to learn it, you need to learn Perl, not CGI :)

so cgi and perl are like scripts? mysql and php are kinda hard to learn, expecially mysql coz its in stuff like blogs and when downloading blogs u get these directions afterwards (in zip files)that confuse u (or just me). i havent been able to download a blog direcly coz of that. :-\

Perl and PHP are both scripting languages- so they are used to write scripts. MySQL isn't really hard. you'll really only be dealing with a MySQL database through a script, and a common combination is PHP and MySQL. in that situation, the PHP script usually interfaces with the MySQL database.

and what you're talking about isn't really learning PHP or MySQL. you're talking about installing a script that uses them, but learning them would be learning how to write your own scripts. if you want to get an idea of what PHP is like, try reading through the beginning tutorial at http://www.php.net

thanks for the link, dude!:)