LAMP (linux apache mysql php) is the fastest growing mid-market platform for web application development in the world. LAMP is open source and has a fantastic price - it’s free! Where do you start as a developer new to these technologies? Let’s take a pragmatic approach and learn about the tools you will likely want to use. These tools will allow you to do just about anything you could imagine on the LAMP stack.

1. BASH shell and BASH scripting: BASH (bourne again shell) is the defacto unix-linux shell for ease of use and power IMHO. When you telnet or shell into your linux server you will need to run an OS shell. BASH has an auto-complete feature that allows you to enter a few characters of a directory or file and then press TAB and BASH will automagically fill in the target file or directory. Imagine having to type in something like this every time you want to use your filesystem: /var/www/petshop.com/catalog/december/foo/bar/baz EVERYTIME on the keyboard. You would get carpel tunnel pretty fast. With BASh you can type much less characters - a must have.
   BASH scripting - you will likely use bash shell scripts every day you develop - and reuse BASH scripts you wrote years ago. Once you learn how to properly use these scripts you will eventually build up a very useful library over time. Shell scripts allow you to run unix commands and use variables, loops, and logic within them. For instance - i have a collection of bash scripts that i use to insert lines of text into web pages with SED (see below). Here is an exellent introduction to bash scripting 101 - primer
2. SED - (Stream EDitor): Sed is an acronym for Stream EDitor - its a command line program that will take a file or string and apply instructions and transformations to that string. Think of it as a non-interactive text editor. When you are creating things like dynamic PHP code for nav bars and HTML page footers - it is extremely useful to know how to manipulate files with sed. You can do things like - erase all lines that contain “apple” and replace with another line of text. Simple and powerful - once you combione sed with regular expressions below sed becomes an even more invaluable tool. Here is a comprehensive source for sed related tutorials and learning tools
3. Regular Expressions ( regexp ): Regular expressions are a very powerful pattern matching tool that can take a body of text and match against a filter. They look a little confusing at first but are incredibly useful. Regular expressions are one of the first things you learn in computer science classes and make life easier for programmers in almost every programming language. Start at wikipedia regular expression entry which is a good starting point to learn.
4. cURL PHP module: This is a very useful PHP module that essentially lets you programatically create a web browser and pull HTML data wherever you need it from. In lieu of a direct integration cURL can act as a programatic screen scaper for you to remotely pull html data into your local php instance. When i am creating software that i am integrating across several websites i will invariably need curl code to do something or other. Great glue module from php. The php site curl documentation is a good start learning curl
5. phpmyadmin: An amazing open source tool that helps LAMP developers manage a mysql database. If you are doing anything with a mysql database more than very basic design with a few tables - go with phpmyadmin. Its very well supported, open-source, and mature. get phpmyadmin here
tags: bash, curl, LAMP, phpmyadmin, regxp, sed, tutorial.