Customer Reviews

Programming PHP

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

With one of the authors, Rasmus Lerdorf, being the creator of PHP you know you are in for a good book and "Programming PHP" certainly doesn't disappoint. This book will take you from the ground floor to developing your own web applications. As with most books, it begins simple and progresses to more advanced topics.

When reading the book cover to cover, you are taught in a logical manner. The concepts of functions and arrays are taught before databases for example. Many books out there today jump ahead too quickly before the foundations are in place. This book does not. While teaching the foundations, Rasmus and Kevin show great programming style. As the preface mentions, their goal is not that you just become a PHP programmer, but a good PHP programmer.

Beyond the basic foundations presented in this book, it also covers topics such as creating images with GD, using the PDF features of PHP, and XML. For those that really want to get knee deep into PHP, they also have a chapter devoted to extending PHP by creating your own extensions. They walk you through creating a simple rot13 extension, then show you what you need to know in order to create more complicated extensions. There is also a chapter devoted to programming in PHP securely. This addresses issues that every PHP programmer, new and seasoned alike, need to pay attention to.

If you are looking for a book to break into the world of PHP, this one should be among the top of the list.

I almost always turn to O'Reilly first when purchasing a new reference book, however this time I was disappointed. This book is fairly shallow in content and much of the information that you need is actually buried in the text instead of being presented as a topic unto itself.

The thing that is the most bothersome, however, is the plethora of flat out errors. Many of the examples have typos, missing code, etc. Even as a PHP novice I was constantly spotting errors which is frustrating when you're trying to learn the language.

On top of that, many of the examples exhibit just plain bad programming form (inefficient code, variables that are only used once, etc). It's the kind of thing that makes a seasoned programmer wince (and if I was reviewing the code I would send it back to the author with lots of red ink).

I liked this book. As an experienced programmer I like that it dove right in and gave me the basics of the language that I needed to get going. Since I am new to PHP I can't speak to what might be missing, as some of the other reviewers allude to, but it certainly seems to have all of the nuts and bolts necessary to get a quick grasp of the language and the "system".

So, why did I give it only 4 stars? Well, there are so many errors in the sample code and between the descriptions and the sample code that it significantly slowed me down, by confusing me. These errors aren't always horrible, but just to give an example the book says, on page 84, that you call the get_meta_tags() function by passing it "the HTML for a web page in a string". Well, the sample shows passing it a URL and if you do pass it a string, it turns out, PHP crashes (at least my installation of PHP does). There are many other examples.

My advice is to not buy this if you expect it to teach you how to program, but if you already have a couple of other languages under your belt, and how to build web pages, this book will get you into PHP quick.

I do not recommend this book for anyone. I am an experienced programmer - not a designer, nor a noob.
The code examples are full of errors. Everything from incorrect cases (A versus a), to deprecated code (many-versions-back deprecated, not just stuff that changed after the book was published), to dumb typos ("noteValue" instead of "nodeValue") and just plain wrong (declare one variable, then use another?). Wasted way too much time debugging "their" code.
They do not explain things well enough. They jump 5 steps into a new concept, that you have no idea what they are talking about, until 5 or 6 pages later, when they finally backtrack to the basics of that concept. By that time, your eyes have glazed over. Had to re-read sections many times to understand what they were talking about off the top.
Not enough hands-on examples. People want to do things, not sit there and just read about it. Then the code they do give isn't complete, so if you try to work with it, you don't know what you are missing, or why it isn't working.
It isn't even good as a reference book. With so many errors, incomplete entries and missing items, is not a reliable source.
I usually prefer books to website tutorials. But am now starting over again with the "Documentation" at http://php.net/docs.php

This was not my first PHP book, and probably it is not the best first book because it doesn't have a fun project to get you psyched. If you've got some of the thick books and feel like you sort of know PHP, this book is like taking a class from a master, with an emphasis on fundamentals. Disorganized and others have said some errors, but you are going to learn something. It is the book I always refer to first and it usually answers my question. I like the fact that it is thin by programming book standards. So to summarize, if you are going to buy 2 or more PHP books I highly recommend this one!

O Reilly publishes the best programming books--they're accurate, elegant and get to the point quickly. Unfortunately, this book is an exception. I agree with the complaints of the other reviewers, e.g., the text has buried information and incorrect examples. However, my main ojection is the index. It appears that the authors simply searched for every keyword in the book then tabulated them in the index. Thus, the index is hardly useful. It's no good to look through several pages just to find that the keyword was used once in a passing sentence that has little to do with that topic.

It sure tries to teach you something but cannot achieve...
As everyone mentioned before, it has countless errors and typos. But there is more than that. Book is out of focus. Examples makes no sense and not related to each other, which is very confusing.
A piece of code here and other piece is there. Every example is coming out of nowhere. It doesn't have a project. So everytime different variables, situations. Like, in one example it uses Flintstones character names ($name=Fred, $name2 = fred etc.). Next example is subjects of a class (math, science, history, english etc.), on other one it uses very random strings like ("I like paris in november", "the key is in my pants")
If you want to learn PHP, stick with "PHP and MySQL Web Development, Second Edition" By Luke Welling, Laura Thompson.

This book has code examples which are full of typos. For example, the code for "self-processing pages" on page 166 won't parse. The publisher's list of unconfirmed errata goes on for 12 printed pages. This is in addition to the confirmed errata, another 2 pages. It does not look like the book's authors want to acknowledge their mistakes or participate in correcting them.

If you are a beginner, steer clear of this book. If you do get it, be prepared to spend a considerable amount of time researching each and every parse error.

I was disappointed in this book. The title implies that the book would cover PHP in the same manner that Programming Perl (from the same publisher) covers Perl, but this is not true. Programming Perl is a very good in-depth reference for Perl, and I still use it frequently. Programming PHP is much too shallow, and I usually have to refer to the online PHP manual available at php.net instead.

this is a thin, mediocre book. at 373 pages, not counting the appendix, this is not a thorough treatment of the language. Maybe Oreilly should rename this "Learning PHP, and put out a thicker, more in depth book that will teach you everything you could possible want to know about php. Think Programming Perl 3rd Edition.