Product Description

Over the past three years PHP has evolved from being a niche language used to add dynamic functionality to small sites to a powerful tool making strong inroads into large-scale, business-critical Web systems.

The rapid maturation of PHP has created a skeptical population of users from more traditional "enterprise" languages who question the readiness and ability of PHP to scale, as well as a large population of PHP developers without formal computer science backgrounds who have learned through the hands-on experimentation while developing small and midsize applications in PHP.

While there are many books on learning PHP and developing small applications with it, there is a serious lack of information on "scaling" PHP for large-scale, business-critical systems. Schlossnagle's Advanced PHP Programming fills that void, demonstrating that PHP is ready for enterprise Web applications by showing the reader how to develop PHP-based applications for maximum performance, stability, and extensibility.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #234197 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 672 pages

From the Back Cover

Over the past three years PHP has evolved from being a niche language used to add dynamic functionality to small sites to a powerful tool making strong inroads into large-scale, business-critical Web systems.

The rapid maturation of PHP has created a skeptical population of users from more traditional "enterprise" languages who question the readiness and ability of PHP to scale, as well as a large population of PHP developers without formal computer science backgrounds who have learned through the hands-on experimentation while developing small and midsize applications in PHP.

While there are many books on learning PHP and developing small applications with it, there is a serious lack of information on "scaling" PHP for large-scale, business-critical systems. Schlossnagle's Advanced PHP Programming fills that void, demonstrating that PHP is ready for enterprise Web applications by showing the reader how to develop PHP-based applications for maximum performance, stability, and extensibility.

About the Author

George Schlossnagle is a principal at OmniTI Computer Consulting, a Maryland-based tech company that specializes in high-volume Web and email systems. Before joining OmniTI, he led technical operations at several high-profile community Web sites, where he developed experience managing PHP in very large enterprise environments. He is a frequent contributor to the PHP community and his work can be found in the PHP core, as well as in the PEAR and PECL extension repositories.

Before entering the information technology field, George trained to be a mathematician and served a two-year stint as a teacher in the Peace Corps. His experience has taught him to value an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving that favors root-cause analysis of problems over simply addressing symptoms.

Customer Reviews

Accurate, Concise, Important
This book covers a whole number of hard core advanced PHP topics. I was at a pretty high PHP standard before I read this book, and when I did read it, it polished off any gaps in my knowledge, and helped me to become better. To give you an idea of how in depth this book is, on commandline PHP scripts, it covers chroot jailing your scripts, forking and controlling child processes from your script and special file locking to ensure only one instance of a script runs at any one time. It's an enormously in depth book that should a) be read well and b) be kept close by as a reference.

Great enthusiasm badly implemented
Like so often with PHP, this book suffers from having boundless enthusiasm for the topics at hand but lacks the professional polish which is so increasingly rare. Within the the first chapter alone there are numerous syntactical errors within the code and the writing surrounding them. As the book progresses these are coupled with ambiguous explanations of potentially thorny problems and some glaring naming inconsistencies.

If you're expecting a thoughtful and precise book, this isn't it, no matter how hard it tries to be. The book highlights a number of excellent ideas but comes off as more of an extended opinion piece by the author with colloquial language and even extolling the virtues of his own software (APC).

Great for the occasional dip into but expect to do a lot of your own research into the topics presented.

A PHP programmers must have!!
If you are a programmer and want to learn about good practice and design ideas, and are not interested in re-reading about loop constructs or basic beginner-type chapters, then this book is for you.

The author is evidently an 'expert' from the way he writes but it is also a very well written book providing informative and advanced ideas on how to get the best out of PHP5.

If you know your way around PHP4/5 and want to move onto the next stage, then buy it....you will not regret it!