Re:Great Book (Score 2, Informative)

I already knew a boatload of perl - I used it all the time as a sysadmin. It was what I wrote CGIs in, using CGI.pm. I already knew Apache, I was maintaining it on the machines at my office. PHP I had to learn from scratch, while mason, embperl already had a perl touch to them, so those were able to be learned quickly. What was really helpful though was having everything in one small space so I wasn't running around to a billion websites trying to figure out the pros and cons of them manually. I didn't have time to do everythin from scratch, it was just all presented right there for you.

As to the disbelief that I did well on the interview, I'm still happily and gainfully employed with a very large e-commerce firm developing for their main page, not some backwater thing. My years as a sysadmin were very helpful in getting the position, actualy.

I've got a copy of this LAMP book, as well as three other books they suggested, here on my desk. When I have a problem, I usually turn to the LAMP book first, and sometimes to the more detailed language specific ones when there's a piece that isn't covered in the LAMP book because it's too detailed.