Tech Lab Notes and UNIX Skills

by D.W. Hyatt

Learning how to use the UNIX operating system will be very valuable in college. Here are simple skills, as well as some more advanced capabilities of this operating system.

Sysadmin Skills - Advanced LINUX Tools

Simple UNIX Skills

Working with PHP

PHP is a new addition to HTML that allows a web designer to create interactive and dynamic web pages easily. It interfaces nicely with a database application, MySQL, that is also available on our web server. To use MySQL, though will need to get a special database account.

Database Capabilities with MySQL

Databases are very useful for saving and retreiving information. Check out these resources.

Perl Resources

Perl is a powerful language that is often used in writing scripts that help handle functions on UNIX systems, and it has also been used for writing interactive programs on the web. Unlike PHP, Perl programs that run on the web must be placed in a special directory called cgi-bin that is under the web-docs directory. Perl is probably still the most commonly used language for writing CGI-scripts, but because languages like PHP are easier to use, it may not be the language of choice in years to come.