Customer Rating:  
Summary: Really. Not. Good.
Comment: Ok, before you buy this book check the publisher's forums (Wrox). It's a bad sign when you see a 3 page thread concerning errors (both with code and grammar).
Of course I didn't follow my own advice. So I'm stuck. ;(
Don't make the same mistake.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not very professional
Comment: This book has taught me a few things, but probably not what the authors intended. A lot of the code is overly complicated (sometimes the code is just bad), and as such I've had to dumb down a number of their examples to better suit myself. There's only one part that I really found useful - the Generic Object class (it's very useful in MVC applications/frameworks).
This book assumes you'll be using PostgreSQL, which most PHP devs don't. There's no reason not to use MySQL. This isn't a huge deal if you have your own DB class already, but it will be a pain if you don't.
Something else that really bugged me was the inconsistency of the code, especially naming conventions. Having multiple authors supply code is fine, but it should appear as if it's all from one source. They should have picked a naming convention and stuck with it.
There are some good concepts in this book, but it's often buried beneath overly complicated code. What I really learned from this book is how to take the authors' code and make it better. I bought this book hoping to gain a better understanding of OOP and MVC - I would have been better off reading online tutorials (DevShed, OnLamp, Zend Developer Zone). If I had to buy this book again, I wouldn't, and I don't recommend that you buy it either.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Needed to be reviewed.
Comment: This book would have a lot of potential if only it had been edited properly. There are simply too many inconsistencies and outright mistakes for me to give this book a good review. The concepts are nice, and ideas good, and the wording easy to read. Problem is, I don't feel I can trust any of the examples, and I learn by example. It doesn't feel like the authors bothered to read their own book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: For Intermediate Developers with Intelligence
Comment: This book is great for experienced developers looking for some ideas in how you can use PHP to implement your application designs.
There are some obvious mistakes and bad design choices in the book, but most intelligent developers will spot these.
The last part of the book is an end-to-end review of a PHP5 life cycle, and it's pretty worthless if you're at all a postmodern developer.
This book is good for some programming ideas and for scratching the surface of how to design good PHP5 web applications.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great breadth, questionable concepts
Comment: I gave it 3 stars for the inspiration that the discussion of a great breadth of PHP/OOP topics provides. There's everything from design techniques to coding practices to project management. Unfortunately, the treatment of most topics is somewhat cursory and many of the code examples are either not thought out carefully or don't work. Thus the code, although it takes up a substantial part of the book, has to be seen as illustration material only. Some of the concepts I found confusing. For example, I am not quite able to understand the purpose of a collection class (chapter 5), given PHP's dynamical typing and associative arrays. Furthermore, the MVC model (chapter 13) is introduced as having a fourth "infrastructure" component. I am not sure what architecture model this would constitute, but it is probably not an MVC model. There are many such quirks in ths book. Programmers who are interested in advanced OOP concepts will find this book to be a good overview of methodical -as opposed to ad hoc- software construction with PHP. In order to actually learn and apply these techniques, a more thorough introduction to object-oriented theory and design is probably required.
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