Product Description

Programming PHP, Second Edition is the authoritative guide to PHP 5 and is filled with the unique knowledge of the creator of PHP (Rasmus Lerdorf) and other PHP experts. When it comes to creating websites, the PHP scripting language is truly a red-hot property. In fact, PHP is currently used on more than 19 million websites, surpassing Microsoft's ASP .NET technology in popularity. Programmers love its flexibility and speed; designers love its accessibility and convenience.

As the industry standard book on PHP, all of the essentials are covered in a clear and concise manner. Language syntax and programming techniques are coupled with numerous examples that illustrate both correct usage and common idioms. With style tips and practical programming advice, this book will help you become not just a PHP programmer, but a good PHP programmer. Programming PHP, Second Edition covers everything you need to know to create effective web applications with PHP. Contents include:

* Detailed information on the basics of the PHP language, including data types, variables, operators, and flow control statements

* Chapters outlining the basics of functions, strings, arrays, and objects

* Coverage of common PHP web application techniques, such as form processing and validation, session tracking, and cookies

* Material on interacting with relational databases, such as MySQL and Oracle, using the database-independent PEAR DB library and the new PDO Library

* Chapters that show you how to generate dynamic images, create PDF files, and parse XML files with PHP

* Advanced topics, such as creating secure scripts, error handling, performance tuning, and writing your own C language extensions to PHP

* A handy quick reference to all the core functions in PHP and all the standard extensions that ship with PHP

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37276 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 540 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Coauthored by its creator, Programming PHP is a nitty-gritty guide to PHP development. PHP is an open-source scripting language used to build dynamic Web sites. In this title, the authors go step-by-step through the language, including brief coverage of common applications such as graphics or database work.

The first six chapters explain PHP essentials, including data types, functions, string manipulation, arrays and objects. Next comes a look at basic Web techniques, followed by an introduction to database access. There is a chapter on generating graphics with the GD extension library and another on creating Adobe PDF documents. The authors then show how to parse XML, and there is a section on security with some handy tips for protecting PHP sites. A chapter on application techniques looks at code libraries, performance tuning and handling errors. Next there is an explanation of how to build extensions to PHP using C, followed by a look at Windows issues such as COM and ODBC. Finally, there is a complete reference to the standard functions in PHP 4.0.

This is not an advanced programming book, but even experienced coders will discover new things about the language and get a clearer understanding of how PHP works. The specialist chapters such as those on XML or PHP extensions tend to be introductory, so readers will need further resources. For example, the database section is short, and would be best read alongside Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL or another book with more detailed database coverage. Even so, this is a strong hands-on title that PHP developers will want to keep close at hand. ----Tim Anderson

Raymond Camden, Hampton Roads ColdFusion User Group, June 2002
"....a well formed and written book, with the 'typical' ORA feel to it—very clear and concise."

Jim Huddle, CompuNotes Issue #191
"Personally, I think the authors did a very credible job of creating a book that even a non-programmer can use to get started...."

Customer Reviews

The treatment of objects lets this book down.
One of the primary reasons I got this book was to get a decent understanding of the use of objects. It fails to deliver on this front. The book assumes you alread know the ins and outs of objects, and fails to adequately explain their role in the language. For instance, it tells you how to create a static method, but doesn't say why you might want to do so, or indeed, how a static method differs from a non-static method! I can make an educated guess at this, but educated guesses are not the way to learn something properly!

Having said that, prior to geting to the object chapter, the rest of the book had been much better. So if you already know your objects or don't intend using that aspect of the language, then you can add at least 1 star to this review.

Too many mistakes
I found this book a good introduction to PHP. But, it has a lot of mistakes. I think these have happened when the book was updated to cover PHP 5.

For example, when it describes constructors it says the constructor is a function named __construct(). But then it immediately gives an example where the constructor for class Person is a function called Person(). The former is PHP 5, the latter is PHP 4. Perhaps the update was a rush job.

If you can't already program in C or C++ then this book may not be for you. If you can, then it's OK.

Very Good
Written in the standard O'Reilly style, this book gives you a comprehensive coverage of PHP without being overly verbose or too dryly technical. Now in its 2nd edition this book covers the most recent version of PHP, version 5.

While I wouldn't want to learn PHP as a first programming language from this book, anybody with a basic knowledge of HTML and an OOP based language (Java, C++ or even JavaScript) will quickly be able to code PHP.

While the book isn't perfect: the aforementioned lack of concrete examples (the cynic in me might think that O'Reilly were saving these for the PHP Cookbook which is due out soon) and the chapter on objects being only 20 pages long, it's still all you would need as both a reference and a learning resource. A strong buy.