Interesting post, David. Thanks for sharing the experience.

>For the PHP part, I just took a quick trip to the local Barnes and Nobel, got a cup of coffee from the Starbucks there, and spent about 2 hours skimming a few PHP books before deciding on one to buy.

Which book did you decide on? Some time ago I went with 'PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites' by Larry Ullman, mostly because I like the Visual QuickPro series it's part of. But I really haven't had to rely on it much because I don't yet have a paying contract that requires these tools, although I think it's only a matter of time.

>...My take is this: Once you've been around the block a few times in application development and understand the concepts and architectural choices (especially with web development), it all boils down to a few trade-offs and different syntax.

You're absolutely right. "Concepts is concepts, and code is code."

>So, does this mean that I should expect to be run out of town now?

Nah. Just don't wear a penquin pin to Advisor DevCon. < s >