PHP is not among my favorite languages, but it is clearly a viable choice for technical and practical reasons. It isn't exactly like the old days ("No one ever gets fired for choosing IBM") but it isn't far away either.

Also, PHP has the CLI, which is a reasonable choice for scripting in Linux shells. So hiring or training someone to use PHP for web development gets you the bonus that they can write other useful scripts too. This lets you avoid possibly less pleasant options such as Perl or BASH. Although I prefer Python or Scala for scripts if not using BASH, PHP is worth looking at for this.

Hell yeah to that... every time I hear someone mention Perl I want to vomit... and when I actually have to look at it, I grab a barf bag.

+1 for Scala

If that were the title, I'd be more interested in reading about this.

If Toyota's cars are not safe ON the ground, who believes they'll be safe OFF the ground?

No thanks Toyota...

I'll second that suggestion regarging CiviCRM.org. If you like Drupal and/or PHP, but don't want to deal with finding & munging together a zillion modules (ewwww!), you should definitely take CiviCRM for a spin. Out of the box it does a lot of great stuff, plus you can customize it beyond that (both on the database and code side).

It does require some investment in learning the developer side if you want to customize, but there's an active community supporting it and you can get help from others.

In addition to them choosing Condoleezza Rice (ewwwww!) for their Board of Directors, did you know @Dropbox costs 4x more than Google Drive for 500GB?

Sign the petition and Drop Dropbox now: http://chn.ge/1iExYQW

And check out #DropDropbox

https://support.google.com/dri...

Drop Condoleezza Rice from the DropBox Board of Directors Now - Sign the Petition!
http://chn.ge/1iExYQW

How to move your files to Google Drive:
http://tucknoloji.com/2012/04/...

... then everything looks like a (NoSQL) nail. Who says you need NoSQL? Nothing against using cool, newish stuff, but as others have pointed out, you didn't describe the scale of your project. Don't blindly pick trendy technology just because you want to sit with the cool kids at lunchtime. If this is an alpha or beta product with under 1 billion records, use a regular database and be done with that. Move onto the interesting parts of your project and fix the plumbing later if you need to.

If you are nervous about costs and overhead time required, you can try out some small apps on a PaaS site such as Heroku https://www.heroku.com/ Then graduate to doing it on Amazon or whatever, once you figure out what you need or don't need, or don't want to be bothered with.

... would it be the same for a cosmonaut as an astronaut?

One more piece of evidence that explains Yahoo's long, slow decline as a software enterprise.

I second the Mims book. I also read this around age 12, and still remember how much I liked it over 30 years later... a real classic! It inspired me to get a degree in electrical engineering. However I would ditch the soldering pen and use a breadboard or something like that!