Finally, a PERL Cookbook for PHP

It gives problems and solutions to everyday problems that programmers face, and conveniently groups the examples by category, such as strings, arrays, etc.

PHP Developer's Cookbook helped me with many of the tasks that I was currently embarking upon, and looking through its contents helped me find new and better solutions for current and future problems.

A word of warning, however, this book will probably NOT teach you PHP. The categories are not placed in a good order for beginners, but are great for those of intermediate and expert programmers alike. If you are new to PHP, I would say look elsewhere, say PHP Essentials, but I would recommend that you definetely keep this text in mind if you decide to further your PHP skills. Strongly recommended for intermediate and expert PHP programmers.

Should be on every PHP Developers Bookshelf

     A few years ago, I gave up on PHP because the books available were so terrible. When PHP4 came out, I decided to revisit both the scripting language and the available resources.

First, the excellent Wrox books came out, and now PHP Cookbook, another excellent resource for PHP programmers. The code snippets are useful on their own, and the coverage of the language is very good. I find myself turning to it even to look up basic function calls, because the use of the function often points out approaches (and additional functionality) that I wasn't aware of.

The book and code samples are well-written, my only complaint is that the source code for the recipes aren't available.

Made my deadline

     I'm not the type of programmer that likes to copy & paste other people's code in my applications, however, every so often I run into problems that I'm not quite sure of the proper way to solve; this book has become invaluable in these cases, whether it is performing HTTP Post requests (hint, use cURL), or parsing data with regular expressions, the book provides a handy reference for all the common and not so common tasks that you might encounter.

One of the things that I really appreciate about the book is that it is written by two PHP core developers, and they often show their knowledge, telling you what goes on behind the scene, offering a variety of different solutions, and then offering the best solution. I've found this information helpful in solving future problems, as I learned what was going on under the hood, therefore, I knew how to optimize the solution.

An excellent book, if you want solutions to problems that you'll constantly encounter, its meant to be a reference on the programmer's bookshelf, not a way to learn PHP (although it definitely has _improved_ my PHP knowledge), ....

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