[Venkatesh]

Hello,

How large do you think your forums will be? I created my first set of web based forums using just batch files and a large text file (in a ramdisk) was the database.

If you want to create a simple, one-time set web application, batch files/shell scripts will suffice. Once you start working with text processing, I recommend you move on to Perl. Perl may be strange in syntax, especially regular expressions, but they are incredibly handy.

If you start to need functionality that Perl cannot easily provide, like interfacing with SQL, networking, etc., then you move on to PHP. I believe that Perl is easier to learn than PHP, but not too many people agree with me here.

One advantage of learning PHP is the ease at which you can connect to an SQL database. Those databases can hold tremendous quantities of data and process it efficently.

Good luck!