'Twas brillig, and Manuel Aude at 23/06/09 08:38 did gyre and gimble:
I'm giving a PHP course next semester (3 hours all saturdays for 22 weeks) and I just realized that PHP 5.3 is coming very soon (2 days now!). So, my plans of teaching PHP 5.2 are starting to change, and I think it's a good idea to teach them 5.3 already. While the majority of the students use Windows, I'm aware that a vast amount will be using Ubuntu/Debian (and some use Gentoo, Fedora and Arch) distributions of Linux, so I'm hoping there won't be too many problems on installation. I don't want to waste the entire first class fixing installation problems, because that kills the student's motivation. The course starts on August, but I'm preparing it during the last two weeks of July. You think that installation packages will be bulletproof by then? Or should I just teach 5.2 and wait for another semester before starting on 5.3? I mean, most hosts will remain with PHP 5.2 for the rest of the year, so I'm a bit confused on what I should do.
Well I'd imagine the vast majority of your course will be covering the basic principles of PHP coding, techniques, GPP, frameworks etc.
Generally most people will want to use a Framework, (Zend, Cake, etc.) which will take a while to adopt PHP 5.3 anyway (some still support PHP4 so what hope is there to use features of PHP5.3 anyway soon!) so I'd suggest teaching the basics on a PHP5.x system and then perhaps spend two or three sessions at the end covering the newer stuff from PHP 5.3.
That's probably the way I'd go, and you can give people some prior warning to try and get a PHP 5.3 install up and running for the x'th week of the course.
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