Customer Rating:  
Summary: If you're not familiar with programming already, steer clear.
Comment: Despite the fact that this book is marketed as an easy, fun "visual learning" tool, the truth of the matter is that if you're a beginning programmer or even someone who just knows their HTML and CSS and was wondering what all this server side scripting was about, you should give this book a wide berth.
As a student and a web developer, I have often been thrown at one programming language or another and been expected to hit the ground running. The result is that while I know how to use certain languages, the why or how is often fuzzy for me. Thus, I was hoping PHP 5 would clarify for me just what it is php is doing with that mysterious Apache.
Unfortunately, the author(s) simply thrust you into installing Apache and PHP, then telling you that you can use echo statements to insert data into the output stream, something like so:
$time = 'Wednesday';
echo 'It is $time.'
That's great, but...
a) What do echo statements actually DO?
b) What is the output stream?
c) So if I want to display the value of a variable, I just stick the name into the string argument of an echo statement?
d) IS that a string I'm supplying to the echo statement?
e) I'm assuming this means I need to escape any $ characters in case php decides whatever comes after it is a variable name?
f) What happens if it doesn't find any variable named $time?
All this from one innocuous little screenshot. This is fine for people who already know what they're doing, but if you're not prepared to puzzle out the answers to these questions and more, or if you have no idea what those questions even mean, I'd suggest waiting for Head First's take on PHP, as the Head First series is much, much more friendly to beginners:
Head First PHP & MySQL
Customer Rating:
Summary: Makes it easy to learn!
Comment: This book may not give every detail of the PHP language, but that's not the point. The idea is to give many very focused lessons on how to perform various programming techniques with PHP in very clear language and well-designed screenshots walking you through each step.
This title makes for both a great reference for old-timers, and has proven to me to be very helpful for learning even the most basic to some advanced techniques. Myself having a mid-level experience with PHP, it has really helped polish my fundamental skills.
I am waiting for the JavaScript Blueprint book, I hope it's as good as this one!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Hard to follow
Comment: I learned ASP and Mysql with great ease and quick progress with 'the visual blueprint' books, the delivery were clear and concise.
But things have changed in this new series. The writing style is difficult to understand: instead of explaining the topic first, the writer jumps right into 'you can do this and that'. I have to read each chapter several times in order to grasp what he means. The screen shots are now arranged on top of one another. Which is by itself ok if the text are not reduced even smaller making it more difficult to read.
I am quite disappointed by this 'new' approach. I hope the publisher has not changed the 'your visual blueprint series' into
just a reference book instead of being a teaching book which it was so good at.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Stop looking. This is what you need.
Comment: So satisfied with their first book - "PHP", I had to see if the second could be as informative and it was. The method of explaination in these books should be the model for all computer books. Nothing is over or under explained. While this book does not cover all that PHP has to offer, it does what it intended - making PHP easy for beginners to learn visually.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Friendly and Practical Reference
Comment: Programming books tend to fall into two categories, learn by example and reference books. If you are new to programming, it's generally easier to start learning by example suspending your knowledge of everything a language can do in favor of examining a few simple scripts to learn the basics. Once you have written a number of small scripts, a good reference book can guide you in writing more complex and functional applications.
On the spectrum of how-to vs. reference, "PHP 5: Your visual blueprint for creating open source, server-side content" falls on the near-side of reference yet is organized in a practical solution based fashion. One of about six PHP books on my bookshelf (and perhaps only second to the php.net website), I find myself referring to this book more than any other reference. It is an excellent reference for things like recalling the syntax of a loop structure to the application of a loop in processing multiple form elements.
Beyond being a solution-based reference, two things I really like about this book is the consistent two-page layout for each concept - a short description followed by code - and code shown in an actual editor window. (I'm not sure what it is about seeing screenshots of code but it seems to sink in better than code formatted in plain text on a page. Hence the Visual approach.)
If you are new to web programming and are looking to buy your first PHP book then you may be better served with a learning through sample projects approach like "Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL" by Kevin Yank. In reviewing this book, expert programmers might scoff and say RTFM. For the rest of us somewhere along the PHP and programming learning curve, I believe this book serves as a friendly and practical reference.
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