Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Jason Gilmore Truly Takes the PHP Novice to Professional
Comment: Prior to acquiring Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL From Novice to Professional I had acquired a half dozen books on these subjects. I have found some to be excellent in areas, but typically they tend to make significant assumptions about the learner. I was surprised to find Jason Gilmore's recent contribution to the literature to be an exception. The goal of taking the learner from novice to professional is addressed well in this book. I found the chapters on the basics of PHP and MySQL to be an excellent review for me, but it was in his transition to more advanced subjects that Gilmore demonstrates his art. I particularly enjoyed his discussion of arrays. It is thorough, well organized and interesting. Likewise, the subjects of Error and Exception Handling, and Strings and Regular Expressions are managed well.
The chapters dedicated to object-oriented programming capabilities, including the new capabilities in PHP 5 will not disappoint the reader. I found that his explanations clarified concepts that had remained a little fuzzy after reading other books on PHP.
Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL is not just a book for beginners, although beginners will feel comfortable with it. Jason Gilmore's goal is clearly to take the novice quickly to a point at which the new programmer can build professional applications. Subjects such as PHP and LDAP, Templating with Smarty, and Web Services allow the PHP novice to make that transition while enjoying the consistency of a single author/tutor. That is important because this is an author/tutor who has a special feel for the needs of the learner.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best PHP Book
Comment: I've been programming with dozens of languages since 1974, but I was new to PHP. This book was exactly what I was looking for! I read the book cover-to-cover. Jason has the unique ability to introduce the subject completely without boring you to tears. He knows when to provide examples, and when to leave the reader to figure out the rest. This is an excellent book for programmers that have seen the patterns before and have experience with other languages. You will immediately "get" how to do things with PHP... and once you do, you may never go back to your "old" programming language.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A great learning guide
Comment: Within weeks of buying this book, I found that my copy rapidly become well worn from use. To me, that's a great indication of how useful and well-written a technical book is. The author's explantions are clear and to the point and the plentiful examples and code snippets really help illustrate the various concepts throughout the book. For me, I like getting my hands 'dirty' by playing with the example code because I find that I learn better that way. When I ran into a problem on an example that I was working on, I emailed the author with a few questions and he responded very quickly and was extremely helpful with suggestions and advice with which I was able to resolve my problem. I highly recommend this book for anyone trying to learn PHP and MySQL.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great introductory text
Comment: I spent several hours in my local bookstore and selected this as the most readable and comprehensive of the selections on these subjects available.
I encountered a problem with the testing of the enviornment after having installed Apache and PHP. On a Sunday evening I sent off an e-mail to the author and had a response before I went to bed. I was amazed.
I am experienced mainframe person with little WEB development experience. This book is serving as a valuable tool to get me moving into the web environment.
I would like more examples but the book is quite lengthy as it is. Perhaps a book on developing a sample application in this envrionment would be useful to those of us trying to get started.
Customer Rating:
Summary: a thorough picture of two great languages
Comment: In terms of explanation of the combination of PHP and MySQL, this book is definitely the best of what I could have my hand on so far. It is instrumental to all levels of readers, even to those who have faintest idea of what is computer programming, like me.
I sincerely urge Jason to continue his work in this area, but this time, I would hope that he would target more on practical applications and provide more visual assistance. I bet his next one will be a bestseller if he would!
|
|
|
