Average Customer Review: 
Programming PHP is a great introduction to PHP. The chapters are well written with good examples that explain what is being discussed. The chapters are not written in a "read one after the other" fashion, so you can easily go to the chapter you need information on and find what you are looking for. This book did have some errors in the sample code, but if you read the text and actually try out the examples you can easily figure out what needs to be fixed to get them running. Since the O'Reilly "Programming" series is more about advanced programming issues, I think this book should have had the title "Learning PHP". It just seems to be an introduction, because it did not delve into any advanced topics. It is worthy to have on any PHP developers bookshelf. Recommended for beginners.
I'm the editor of Programming PHP. I can vouch for the fact that Rasmus was a fully-fledged author. Besides fact-checking everything that the other authors wrote, he contributed many chapters of his own. I don't know where the idea that Rasmus was "just supervising" or "has not done any major writing" came from (it's not a conclusion you could come to from actually *reading* the book) but it's absolutely wrong.By all means be vague ("fairy land") and strange (LDAP and SNMP as "what makes PHP what it is today"?!) in reviews, but please don't be dishonest. For my rating of this book, by the way, I came as close to the current average ranking as I could. I'm obviously not impartial (I think the book's a 5!) but I don't want my partiality to bias the reader ratings.
| A cmprehensive language overview | |
This text is another well-produced O'Reilly reference. It provides a methodical description of the PHP server scripting language. If you don't know what PHP is, this is a good starting point. If you have never programmed before, why are you using PHP? (you should learn programming somewhere else than exposing your work on the WWW - in my opinion!). Very detailed descriptions of the language elements are provided; language structure, data types, variables, operators, anything you would expect from a programming language text. Good detailed sections on string handling (isn't that chiefly why you use server scripts?) and arrays are included. Examples showing how to strip 'bad characters' or HTML from strings are helpful, detailed regular expression usage and variable argument functions are very practical. For advanced programmers, the text provides details on objects (called classes) that allow you to incorporate OOP into your server scripts. Sections are provided that gives details of graphics programming using the GD extension and PDF text document creation that I found to be useless. The appendix includes a good section on all PHP functions which is a handy reference.... The description of database support is really limited. They hardly mention MySQL or mSQL and focus more on PEAR DB, which is an object-oriented database system. I found this as a major weakness. Otherwise, this is another admirable O'Reilly offering.
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