A Day in Paradise

My Zend PHP Certification Study Guide arrived about 10 minutes ago. This short review is based on the information I absorbed from the book in a quick flip through the pages.

The first impression of the guide is the size of the book. It is very thin, a mere 223 pages, not counting the index. There are 13 chapters, starting with Basic PHP, and then going straight into Object-Oriented PHP, and then PHP and the Web, and then on to Arrays, Strings, Files, Dates, Email, DB, Streams and Network, Security, Debugging and Performance, and finally Getting Ready for the Certification Exam.

Each chapter starts with lists of �Terms you’ll need to Understand� and �Techniques you’ll need to master�, and ends with Exam Prep Questions. Every chapter is full of code snippets to demonstrate techniques, and the syntax of functions.

The introduction explains that the guide and the exam were put together to with the intent of balancing theory and real world scenarios. The Managing Mail chapter displays this well as it not only covers regular mail sending but basic MIME, attaching files, creating HTML email and attaching images, and basic email delivery tips.

I’m was surprised to see that the 11 page database section focuses only on SQL with hardly a single line of PHP code. Seeing that PHP interfaces with so many different databases, and many of the interfaces vary slightly, it’s more logical to take the database agnostic view that they have taken. Later on in the book when referring to database queries they use the object oriented PEAR::DB like $db->query(’…’) syntax. Again, a good choice.

The coding style is too spacious for my liking, but apart from some varying tab length it’s fairly consistent throughout the guide. Format of SQL statements are sometimes inconsistent, with some �SELECT FROM� and other �Select From�, one �INSERT into�, but I can live with that.

You don’t need this book if you just want to use PHP. You can even try your luck, and take the test without reading the book. But an exam is an exam, there’s nothing like a good study guide to get you ready for the exam. You wouldn’t want to flunk because you don’t remember what the third argument to strpos() was would you?

This entry was posted on Friday, September 17th, 2004 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Five-Minute-Review, PHP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.