Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Pretty useful book!!
Comment: I got a lot out of this title. Having known almost nothing about PHP to begin with, I am now able to do some pretty neat stuff...
Thanks..
Customer Rating:
Summary: Beginning PHP
Comment: I have always felt that WROX books were the best computer books on the market, until I read this one. There are tons of grammatical errors, which I can deal with. However, the syntax errors are far too numerous for this type of book. Also, some of the programs do not do what they are suppose to. If you are new to PHP, then stay away from this book. I am glad I bought this book from Amazon and paid a discounted price instead of buying it from WROX and paid the full cover price. At least I minimized the money I wasted on this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Too verbose, too many typos, too many authors
Comment: Wrox books used to stand for quality but not anymore. I'm a web developer (MS tools mostly) and wanted to expand my skillset to include PHP. I relied on Wrox before but never again. I found so many typographical errors in both text and code samples. The errata download is useless since it missed 90% of the errors. The chapters seem to run on and on and on without fully explaining ALL of the code used in the samples [ie. code contains "this->var" but doesn't explain what "->" does]. There doesn't seem to be any consistency through out the book. Shame, the editing of this book probably suffered due to the transfer of ownership when Wiley took it over from Wrox Publishing. I'd suggest reading the PHP 5 manual that can be downloaded from from the PHP website. You can cover more in 30 minutes reading the online manual than you would in 8 hours reading this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: a little dissapointed
Comment: First off, I found many errors, grammatical and in their code, within the first three chapters. Then, to make sure I was on the right track I referenced the exercise solutions in Appendix A. They use code that they don't even introduce for another 400 pages. The first couple chapters are okay at teaching with syntax and showing how to write good code. Not great or outstanding, not even good... just okay. I'm definitly going to stay away from Wrox when I buy more programming books. Anybody have an awesome PHP book they want to sell me?
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not much on PHP5, bad SQL
Comment: The best parts of this book are the first chapters that provide a very methodical introduction to the core functional aspects of the language. Not only do they provide good syntax instruction, they also teach you about writing good PHP code.
The trouble comes in the SQL database access chapter, in it's use of string concatenation to build SQL insert, update and delete statements. That strategy is prone to SQL injection attacks, and just basic buggy behavior. What's worse is that the section on PEAR, where you would expect to see SQL done well, doesn't reference the PEAR SQL wrapper.
In addition the book only has two chapters on the Object Oriented properties of the language. Where the first is just an overview of basic OO methodology.
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