Attempting PHP

[#1]

Hi everyone,
I am about to start working through the PHP tutorials at w3schools.com and I wish to upload my scripts to some webspace hosted by plus net. The website is for a friend's company and and the webspace is in her package with plus net. From what I have read to use the CGI facility I can only upload from a plus net network, however my current provider is sky broadband. Does this mean I wont be able to upload to the CGI space?
I have just come across this new PAYH service and plus net reccommends that if i start using php to use this PAYP instead of CGI. Will I have the same problem tho? Am I able to upload to this via a non-plusnet ISP? And is this the best place to practice php?
Thanks in advance for any help!

[#2]

Hello
Good for you - jump in and enjoy. I'd recommend you find some free web space... there is still some about... to play in first.
Thing is I believe (and I could be wrong) that the cgi-bin here at Plusnet is on a LInux server., so I'd recommend you find a free bit of space that's Linux. There can be slight differences in the way the different web servers parse php.
By grabbing some free space, you can play and mess about without troubling your friend yet, do all the daft things learners do and know it's all tidy somewhere away from any serious work.
Best of luck - learning's fun.
Erm... the other thing is that ... I think... PlusNet (PN) are on an old version of PHP though there seems to be some discussion which is unclear about implementing the latest PHP. So bare in mind you might be best learning php4 first rather than as a learner find yourself grappling with the inevitable issues of trying to write php5 when a server doesn't support it. Happy for others here to advise you otherwise.

[#3]

Quote from: english

however my current provider is sky broadband. Does this mean I wont be able to upload to the CGI space?

yes, for security reasons, access to cgi server is restricted to plusnet connection I'm afraid.

Quote from: english

I have just come across this new PAYH service and plus net reccommends that if i start using php to use this PAYP instead of CGI. Will I have the same problem tho? Am I able to upload to this via a non-plusnet ISP? And is this the best place to practice php?

you can upload to PAYH from non-plusnet connection  to try the PAYH service, please check the trials page

[#4]

Thanks to you both for the advice, I think I'll try some free space first to mess about in and then when i'm ready (might be a long time!) i'll take a look at PAYH.
Thanks again!

[#5]

This reply is a bit late - I only just noticed the thread, but for anyone like me who stumbles across it...
I recently did a technical review on a book teaching PHP and MySQL and needed somewhere with PHP5 to test the code. I discovered that my PN CGI space was only PHP4 and also tried PAYH. In the end, I went for a free software solution, XAMPPLite, which allows me to run an Apache server with MySQL and PHP5 on a local Windows 2000 PC. It's not web-accessible so, like the ravenous bugblatter beast of Traal,  it's completely safe. There are similar packages for other hosts (such as Apple and Linux), but I've no experience with any of them.
Hope that helps (someone $;-),
David