Customer Reviews

Beginning PHP 5.3 (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

How I wish there was a Matt Doyle's textbook back when I began learning PHP. Well, I guess, better late than never!

Having worked in technical education for many years, and more recently as a front-end web developer, I know how crucial it is for educators and web designers to have a good grasp of the workings of PHP. PHP is the most widely used programing language, developed from the ground up, to address the needs of the web browsing consumer.

Back in November 2009 while looking at new arrivals in the technology section at a local bookstore, I came across what I consider now, the ideal book on the subject of PHP. Beginning PHP 5.3 by Matt Doyle "speaks" directly to my urgent need to understand what PHP is all about. This textbook "magically" (to borrow a term used recently by Steve Jobs) has clarified my understanding of many concepts in PHP that for years I felt pretty fussy about!

In 800 pages, it does the best job I know on the PHP language basics, including an extensive treatment of PHP's advances in object-oriented programing. Even better, I now also have a chance with this book to be very much up to date on the newest features of PHP programming brought on by version 5.3. Advances like object overloading, abstract classes, interfaces, namespaces and XML parsers are treated by Matt Doyle in his characteristic down-to-earth style. What's more, he never forgets to illustrate further the various subjects treated in the book, with the most appropriate and simplest code examples available.

For schools with courses on programming, Beginning PHP 5.3 is, without a doubt, an excellent textbook. It even includes exercises at the end of every chapter, with the solutions at the end of the book.

As for me, I'm planning to donate my whole PHP book collection and just keep my copy of Beginning PHP 5.3 (together with its eBook version) for my own learning pleasure and ready reference.

This is an excellent book with a great layout. It is great for anyone who has no prior PHP or programming experience. It is a very good reference book for anyone who is familiar with programming, as well.

Having done a bit of programming previously, I was able to pick up on most of the concepts quickly. If you have prior experience, you will be able to gloss over the first few chapters quickly. If you are new to any programming, it gives you a very good step-by-step explanation of the various tools you have to work with. The wrox "try-it-out" style is very good at using what you just read, and cementing the concepts or procedures into memory. If you atually do the projects and don't just read over them, you will learn PHP very quickly.

Although the book keeps away from some of the more advanced techniques you might be looking for, it still does well to teach intermediate-level concepts in the second half.

Finally it does a good job of teaching proper programming fundamentals and methods. There were very few times where I didn't fully understand the explanation in the try-it-out boxes, or where I had to go back and carefully sift through the logic to understand anything.

I got what I was looking for out of this book.

I rarely write reviews, but after finishing the book I felt compelled to. This book is the best book on PHP I have ever read, and I have read alot of them. Everthing from PDO, to Object Oriented Programming,Regular Expressions, Image Creation with GD, XML, and more is within the pages of this book.

Highly Recommended For Newbies and Pro's alike.

Purchased this book just beginning of this month, and I am on Chapter 8 as I am writing this book review. This book is really easy to follow if you want to get started with PHP programming. The best part that I like the most about this book is the exercises at the end of each chapter. It's a good way to test myself and go back to review some of the areas that I need to complete those exercises, then I can discuss with other programmers on wrox.com forum site.

This book is a great introduction to PHP. I had no experience with PHP when I decided to learn it earlier this year, and I began with the "Head First PHP" book from O'reily. I really like that series, but it was not a good way to learn PHP. This book is simple, straight-forward, and concise. The arrangement of the book is very well thought out, and the book really doesn't assume any prior knowledge. That being said, the subject is complicated, and does take a solid effort to get, but the text does a great job of building on itself. I really like the book, and I think I will stick with the Wrox series from now on. You can also preview portions of the book on Google books.

This book had great coding examples and very well written and easy to understand code, but my biggest problem was when the examples would include the PEAR framework. Only one install of PEAR worked, and the other one that is used a lot, the HTML_QuickFrom wouldn't at all. Not only is this one deprecated, it fired off a ton of errors and I couldn't get the form to work with the other examples. I understand using the QuickForm would be easier and nice to work with, but in my opinion the PEAR framework is kind of skeptic to use at times. I don't think the book should keep using the examples if people can't even use the framework and it's hard to tell the book, "These examples aren't working". Other than that, really great book and I learned a lot and enjoyed reading it!

If you want to learn PHP, this is the book to get. It's easy to read, and also a great reference. This is one of the best programming books I've ever purchased.

Thisb book cover all thing you need to know about being Php and wrox give you plenty of code detail to help you understand how the code work and give you great support of predone codes so you can physically see how the codes work.

This is great book and helped me a lot. I believe it will also help down the road. Would recommended it to anyone

l come from a chinese background, however, l found this book quite useful and well explained, its quite easy to understand for me.