Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Beginning PHP Not Beginning Programming
Comment: [Updated for Second Edition]
A beginning PHP book, not a beginning programming book. The subtitle, 'From Novice to Professional', can be a tad misleading for the novice coder. A beginning programming book covers a lot of material that this book assumes the reader already understands. Many software books include a 'Who Is This Book For' section that offers some guidance on the suitable reader knowledge level, not this one.
That said, I found this book to be very helpful. The sections on installing and configuring Apache, PHP and MySQL certainly saved me many hours of reading the online documentation and tweaking of settings while setting up my local test bed. That, in itself, made me a very happy camper. The author goes on to cover the various aspects from the basics of the PHP language and class libraries to topics like Authentication, Security, Session Handlers and eMail functionality that help anyone new to PHP setup some fairly sophisticated site capabilities.
The second edition has been supplemented with an added 200 pages, including a new section on PEAR (PHP Extension and Application Repository). This is a wealth of prewritten classes and packages that can be used to add even more sophisticated functionality to the novice's web development toolbox. The author demonstrates several of the more prominent packages.
The second edition has greatly beefed up with additional coverage of MySQL 5, including chapters on stored procedures, triggers and the PHP mysqli extension (all missed in the first edition). Most of the examples offered are clean and general enough to be useful templates for the reader's tailoring.
My suggestion for novices to PHP is read through chapter 9, then skip to the various sections that solve specific problems being faced or are of particular interest, including installing and configuring your local test bed.
Bottom line, the first edition was a good book for intermediate to veteran programmers looking for a quick tutorial on PHP (circa version 5.0); the second edition is even better. Novice programmers should ensure that they have a full understanding of the basics of programming (and OOP) before attempting it. I would now use this book to teach a class on PHP.
P-)
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Great coming from a Perl background
Comment: Having Perl knowledge, you can cover the first 200 pages in no time. If you haven't done any programming before, you might need to reference another book for more indepth examples. The bulk of the book is installing and configuring Apache/PHP/MySQL. I found myself skipping alot of it since I rent a server that already has it. I would give 3 stars for his review of PHP (should have provided more examples), and 5 stars for MySQL (feel completely confident exploring it now).
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Best PHP Book Yet
Comment: PHP books often claim to be applicable to an absolute beginner to the professional, yet many fail to live up to this claim, except for this book. The word "beginner" doesn't mean someone who has no knowledge of html, or no knowledge of programming in general, but rather someone who knows a bit of html and maybe basic or c++ and would like to venture into the online programming world. So if you at least know that, then this book will be on your level.
What sets this book apart from the rest is a few things. First, the examples are short and to the point. There aren't pages and pages of code, where only a select portion of it is explained. Rather, Jason introduces a function and then provides a small example to explain it. Also, Jason is very good in his examples of sticking to only things he has taught you; which means you won't find yet-to-be explained functions in his code.
The second thing that sets this book apart from the rest is how Jason introduces new PHP internal Functions and other commands. There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of internal Functions and concepts in PHP and MySQL, but only a handful are used often. So every PHP/MySQL author has to determine where to draw the line at what things to discuss, and what to leave out. I've read many other PHP books and their focus is generally too broad, leaving many important functions out of their books. Not so with Jason's book. Reading through his book sometimes feels like you're reading though a PHP/MySQL manual because there are so many introduced functions and keywords, but after reading about each you instantly see how important each is. So in a nutshell, Jason introduces many more important functions than other authors, while not discussing things that you'll rarely ever use.
The third thing that sets this book above the rest is his in-depth coverage of optional/required modifiers for each function along with the various return values. For example, this is how Jason introduces filetype:
filetype()
string filetype (string filename)
Jason then explains the various return values possible like block, char, dir, etc etc. So, after you've read about a function or keyword, you come away feeling like you completely understand it. Many other PHP books will introduce a function or keyword and maybe describe a few features regarding it so when you walk away, you might wonder if it does anything else...
The fourth thing setting this book apart from the rest is Jason's explanation of Superglobals like $_GET, $_POST, etc. Many other PHP books don't even cover this! And those that do, just give a cursory overview of it. But these tools are so essential to PHP functionality that they really need to be given a proper explanation for a "beginner" learning PHP. And, only Jason's book gives that proper explanation.
Many more reasons set this book apart from others, that I could be here all day explaining them. His explanation of Object-Oriented PHP is excellent. He has chapters devoted to Regular Expressions and Working with the File and Operating System, things other books don't even cover. He discuses Authentication using PHP, something that almost anyone using PHP uses yet many PHP books don't even discuss. There are numerous other reasons why I really love this book, but I'll leave them to the reader to discover.
Though in the spirit of a good review, I do have some issues with this book. First, there are some chapters which I don't need to use, and probably never will: LDAP stuff, SOAP, SQLite, and some other stuff. This is a PHP and MySQL book, so I wish he would have ditched those chapters and discussed something that more users of PHP and MySQL can relate to.
Oh, and I should have mentioned this earlier but I just remembered it. Many, MANY, PHP books out there have an incredible amount of errors in them. In those books you'll find tons of errors in the examples, in the actual text, and in other places. But after reading all 600 pages of Jason's book, I really have to hand it to the editors. While I found an error here or there, they were few and far between. After finishing reading it, I knew that this was professionally written. Not a bunch of pages slapped together over the weekend. This is a professionally written book.
And one more compliment I can give is the way Jason talks in his book. He doesn't "talk to talk" or use fancy words in long sentances which have no practical value. In quite a few PHP books, I would get really confused after reading a paragraph or two and all it contained was words (no code)! PHP books aren't meant to contain technical writing nor feel like you're reading a section of the US Tax Code. Jason does a really good job of being direct and concise in making his points, and he's really easy to understand.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Well written, but has its quirks
Comment: The book is very well written but it almost assumes that you have had some type of programming experience. Reading the book I had to refer back to other programming languages I have learned like Java and C++ that have similar syntax in order to fully understand the concepts that he was trying to get across. Most of the book is understandable, but certain areas of the book (for example when he covered the printf() function) are a little bit vague. Overall it's a pretty good book, if he ever comes out with a second edition I'm sure it'll be extremely popular.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Some good info, but not ideal for beginners
Comment: I read this book primarily to gain a better understanding of the new features available in PHP 5, and in many cases this book excelled in that aspect. Particularly, I felt the chapters on object-oriented programming were the most valuable. On the other hand, I was somewhat disappointed that the author didn't cover the new MySQLi extension for use with MySQL 4.1, as I felt that this was another prominent upgrade in PHP.
This book does cover some topics that many PHP authors tend to skip. Some examples of these include Templating with Smarty, LDAP, and RSS. If any of these topics interest you, or if you're looking for a solid reference on object-oriented programming in PHP 5, then I highly recommend this book. As an introduction to PHP, however, I'd have to say this isn't the book you're looking for. Part of the reason I make this statement is the order of the topics. For example, MySQL isn't even introduced until the end of the book, long after more advanced topics are covered. It seems to me that someone learning PHP should learn about basic database interaction long before they have any interest in advanced networking functions, or creating a SOAP server. Additionally, I would expect a "Beginning" book to contain more practical examples and sample projects (just my opinion).
Overall, I'll give this book a rating of 3 stars. While I enjoyed the authors tone and writing style in general, the content, order of topics, and misleading title left me a bit disappointed. I have had better luck with other Apress books.
|
|
|
