16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Useful but a book that can make you frustrated, July 25, 2005
This review is from: Apache, MySQL, and PHP Web Development All-in-One Desk Reference for (Paperback)
I consider myself as pretty much a patient problem solver when I actually encounter problems. But as I begin to use this book as a reference book to build my first website based on MySQL, PHP, and many other languages, I found myself getting seriously annoyed at the fact that this book offered me.
That is not meant to say this book is a horrible book. First of all, as this book is published as "For Dummies series", the author "is obliged" to write as you do not much about anything, though the author himself most likely did not incline toward the obligation. And, as it is written on book covers, this book truly covers the seven topics in one, and each of the topics is explained in detail and in plain language to make you easy to understand.
But despite of these positive sides, it is unfortunate that this book seriously needs revision. To remind you, this book is a book targetting toward beginners. At the same time, however, this book is also a book targetting toward those who are actually intending to use PHP and other applications mentioned here to build a website. But before I mention what are the problems with the book, I want to let you know something about PHP. Those who already know or do not bother to know about it, just skip over to 2nd paragraph following this.
For those who do not know, PHP is a language that can easily frustrate you if you make a single, minimal mistake such as: replacing a single quote as a double quote, absence/addition of a a blank line or a space, etc. To make things worse, when you run the PHP page with errors in web, it will give you errors that is not only unpleasant but almost entirely useless. I first used Notepad to write/edit the scripts, but lated I had to rely on Dreamweaver to make edits less frustrating -- but with no significant improvement. And for those who do not have these expensive IDE softwares, you will probably spend hours to see what have done wrong in your script.
Now, continuing with the problem with the book... The author makes a serious mistake by leaving incorrectly written scripts on several portions of his book. For example, these is this PHP script written on Chapter VI, Chapter 7, "Creating a Username System for Your Website", that shows you entire scripts for useraccess.php file. The file itself is about 151 lines wrong(I say "about" because the script itself really depends on how you design the script), and there are 7 other files, either html or php, that works in conjunction with this file. By running the script, I got an error message that is basically useless. I ran the program in numbers of times more again, and I later found that the problem was actually in the book: there were 19 "{" sign but only 18 "}" sign in the script! I still ran in a couple more problems again after fixing the mistake. In any case, the book makes several mistakes that can guarantee you to get frustrated unless you are already a programming gru.
In addition, while the author goes each portion pretty extensively, he somehow seems to assume that you read about previous parts of Books before you goes to next Book. What I mean by that is, for example, when he mentions about objects in PHP, he actually wants you to go back and read the parts in Perl to make you understand it. I do not think that is not really a good approach for beginners who will read this book because some users simply do not want to spend extra time to read over another books mentioning about Perl or Apache when they just wants to learn PHP. And often, I strongly felt that there needs to be more explanations regarding each issue, and I visited his website to see whether there is maybe a forum or a tutorial set up regarding the book. What I only found from his websites is articles regarding another computer language C, download search that is basically useless for me, and, oh, some Google and other affiliate ads to make himself some money. Nice...
So, to conclude, I cannot really say that this book is a great book for beginners. Maybe, you will find that this book is not even an okay book, or maybe you will. However, what I suggest to you is that, if you buy this book from a bookstore, be sure to have a mind to learn through trials-and-errors with frustration rather than just using scripts written from the book.
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