I really enjoyed reading this book, and I did learn a good deal of things in the process. However this book covers a lot of topics, and because of that it doesn’t get too in depth about any one subject. It mostly skims over many of the new OOP features of PHP5, and PEAR. Think of this book as a good resource for further web research.
This book is one of those rarities in computer-book industry that are actually worth reading and a place in your bookshelf. The authors do an excellent job at uncovering what lies beneath the hood, so to speak. The first few chapters are a great refresher for those of us who come from a different programming language background. The intorduction to OO programming and patterns is one of the best I’ve read coming from a non-academic source. Thereafter is when the real substance surfaces. Showing how to take full advantage of not only PHP5’s OO, but also of the C-based Zend engine and PEAR modules. The chapters on database connectivity are absolutely outstanding. The book is well written, and in some parts goes down to the time and space complexity and also the data structures used by the engine. Very good book overall. The only reason I did not give five stars to this excellent primer is because I found at least five or six typographical errors in the first few chapters. Not a big deal, just a matter of personal preference. A must for PHP power developers.
The title says it all for power programmers if you are new to the php world and web applications in general getting into this book may be tough. Ok, they have a whole chapter devoted for the basics but its not a tutorial for you to learn how to do php the main focus of this book is the new object oreintation in php5 and it goes indepth with pear it allows you to really take your website application scheme and shows you what you can do with the php5 it now has a database built in with it but again for those of you who may want to read this book to learn the basics it may not be for you it requires that you have a fairly wide knowledge base of programming in general php is basically the best of all kinds of programming languages as the authors put it. There are some good examples for web applications but I think that they could probably have a site with the tutorials or a cd with php5 on it compiled differently for those different types of unix. Coming from the people who had for the most part created php it s a solid book could have gone through some more proof reads as I saw some mistakes which is just the critically anal side of me showing but I think it would be a good book to read if you have dealt with the php world before and are wanting more about the newest verion then go for it but if are just wanting to learn try something else
I had no experience with php (well other than reading the other book) and found this book very accessible. The book gives you enough information to get started on php5 and the majority of its features. It even has information about writing your own php extensions. Although I really didn’t find the all the Pear info that helpful.
I do really wish the book had more information on design patterns etc for php 5. It did go over a few but not ones that are particularly useful for building applications for the web. But I guess this is sort of the status of PHP, its still seems to be a sort of hacky scripting language.
We will talk about PHP and your involvement more than the book itself.
