Customer Reviews

Core PHP Programming: Using PHP to Build Dynamic Web Sites (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(17)
1 star:		(44)

 

 

This book does a solid job of listing the basic functions and descriptions and is aimed more at the beginner, so I would recommend it to someone who is just starting out with PhP and/or who may not want to be online all the time to get reference help. Experienced PhP programmers probably won't find enough in this book to warrant it's cost, but the beginner should definitely consider buying it.

This book is a nice reference but doesn't really have much beyond what you can find online. (which you can also download for free). In fact I find the online manual more helpful because of the annotations which make it a work in progress. It's a philosophical issue - do you like having a real book in your hands to browse through or do you not mind using a web browser?

This is a wonderful book! I've had this nagging background need to learn PHP for some time and have been putting it off as one of those extra little tasks I could do without. After reading just a little of this book I couldn't wait to get started!

Leon Atkinson aims his book at both beginner and advanced users and his writing style manages to score a direct hit! The basics are covered in sufficient detail to allow the intelligent beginner to follow along and learn useful stuff pretty quickly. This is achieved without talking down to advanced users, or bogging them down in masses of simple things. The organisation and layout of the book is good enough to allow most readers to jump straight into the sections that interest them most, so if you just want to use this book for reference, rather than have it act as a tutor, you can. Lots of references to more elementary programming texts are provided for anyone who does find themself struggling with the concepts, but I can't really imagine anyone needing them.

Coverage is very comprehensive too, so you never find yourself left in the lurch just as things are about to get really interesting, as I've had happen in many books aimed at beginners. So far, this book has provided good solid instruction of every PHP task I've needed or fancied (although a better index wouldn't go amiss!) and has frequently provided me with a coded solution all ready to plug in and use! I can see that this volume will have a place alongside my computer for some time!

This book was the first of five I now own on the topic, and while many of the criticisms written previously here are accurate (especially the irritating example code which doesn't show you the resulting output), I still find myself pulling this one off the shelf because of some of its virtues :

1) It's a decent introduction to PHP, because it won't overwhelm the first-time web programmer, and pretty much assumes you don't know much of anything

2) Despite the amazingly disorgranized approach to the topic, certain sections are quite useful : regular expressions, various sorting methods, generating graphics on the fly, and basic approaches to integrating HTML & PHP are well covered.

3) Even though it's an apparent ploy to boost the page count of a book of somewhat shallow content depth, the fact that the type is larger than average with huge bold headlines for each function really helps if you're just flipping through looking for something specific.

4) The cover is actually attractive, unlike the usual monstrosity of a cover of Professional PHP Programming (why does WROX think we acutally want the faces of the authors staring up at you all the time ? ). OF course, Professional PHP Programming is far and away the best book on this topic if you have any programming experience.

Fluff, fluff, and more fluff. Unless you have some sort of vested interest in this book I think you too will agree it is hardly even worth one star. It is full of white space, one can see it has been printed with a view towards making as many pages as possible - big text, spread out paragraphs, etc - like we used to do in high school when we needed a ten page paper but had very little worth while to present to the reader. This is bad enough and certainly would make any programming book suspect when such tricks are resorted to. But flipping through the book I also came upon a number of errors in the code and text and there must be many more I missed (since I did not purchase the book and use valuable time attempting to learn from it). There is little of anything new here that can not be seen, almost word for word, in the main PHP website in the manual. It seems the author basically copied and pasted this material from the net (and added his errors to round it out) to make a book. Save your money, wait for the movie.

I was fairly warned by Amazon reviewers that this book issimply a print version of the PHP functions found on [the internet], but I went ahead and bought it anyway. I figured that the author must have added something to the online documentation. As it turns out, the author's additions consist mostly of typos and grammatical errors. I wouldn't mind it so much if Atkinson had at least added a useful topical index. Instead, the index is largely a listing a PHP's functions. Why bother? Considering PHP's power and elegance, I wouldn't be surprised if Core PHP Programming turns out to be an act of sabotage hatched by the Microsoft folks. Fortunately, the language not only survived this attack, but has flourished.

This book does not know what it is trying to be - it is an OK copy of the online docs - but is bulked up (lots of space and a BIG font) to make it look like it covers a lot of ground. This makes it look like a detailed tutorial - and this it definitely is not.

I came to the book (and PHP) as a complete novice - and found that there was a simple lack of good examples - all of the functions are documented - but there is little in the way of description as to why you would want to use any of them.

At the end of the day I felt that I would have been better off printing out the docs that down load from the PHP web site.

Tom.

I bought this book hoping it would expand upon the online documentation. However it is infereior to the online docs. It doesn't offer any helpful sample code. Also, some of the information in the book is incorrect. For example, the function mysql_connect_db requires that it be assigned to a variable. Throughout the book the function is called without being assigned to a variable. After hours of trying to figure out why I could not get my scripts to work, I went to online and immediately found my answer. So, if you you want to learn PHP stick to the online documentation. Save the trees.

I was going to give it three stars but after reading the reviews I realized I was being far too generous yet I can't quite follow the herd and give one star. But, this book deserves one star. The bulk of the book appears to be cut and pasted from the manual. So save the money. One example of the books short comings is the section on regular expresions, which is pathetic. Whereas, the manuals is rather extensive. The examples are anemic and not very "real world". Advice -- ping O'Reilly until they publish a book on PHP, study the manual and visit the web based tutorials.

I wasn't going to review this book until I read Robert Peters' review. It is factually incorrect. I had to respond. I can only guess that Robert got a copy of the FIRST edition, which apparently ... This second edition is great.

First, Robert suggests that the book is "just a fat manual that lists functions" -- like a reference. Part 2 of the book is indeed titled "Functional Reference" and consists of 450 pages of functions (with sample code for most functions, organized into logical sections, like "Image Functions" and "Database Functions"). However, the book has THREE other parts, consisting of 300 more pages!

Part 1 is titled "An Introduction To PHP" (7 chapters, about 120 pages). It teaches the fundamentals of programming, has tons of screenshots and sample code, and is written in a conversational style that makes it easy to understand the technical stuff. The author's explanation of variables (page 16) is good, and he also covers loops, functions, arrays, etc. If Robert's other criticism of the book, that "it won't teach you how to use the language" is true, then what is all of Part 1 for?

Part 3 is titled "Algorithms" (5 chapters, about 100 pages). It steps you through real-world examples, and while none of the examples are huge (like "here's a complete e-commerce shopping cart solution"), they are all practical and can be combined to create what is needed. For instance, modify the discussion forum sample on pages 635-641, combine it with the code samples for session handling, and you could allow users to enter and store "preferences" for your Web site, or you could allow users to append comments to articles, like ZDnet does.

Part 4 is titled "Software Engineering" (3 chapters, 80 pages). It addresses one of the big controversies with server-parsed HTML, and that is: "gasp, you've combined code with HTML!" The author talks about why it is an issue, and outlines different ways to embed PHP in HTML. I don't like his conclusion (turn everything into PHP and use "print" to output HTML), but I must admit I am elated to see someone discussing the issue.

In conclusion, Robert's other criticisms of the book -- that it doesn't show how to "build dynamic web sites" and that the book doesn't explain how to use functions "within the context of a script" -- just shows he didn't bother to actually read it. Almost EVERY function has a code sample. And almost ALL the database examples are used precisely for building dynamic Web sites. Perhaps Robert thinks "dynamic Web sites" is the same as "Dynamic HTML" -- if so, he should get a book on JavaScript and leave Core PHP Programming to those of us who are ready to learn about database-driven sites. Because as far as I'm concerned, this book is great for learning and using PHP. Better than the PHP Bible.

While the author did come up with better documentation for a few functions which were not (at the time he wrote the book) well-documented online, the book is basically an expensive copy of the online documentation for PHP. If you're looking for a "PHP Desk Reference" and you've got the budget, go ahead and buy it. Otherwise, look elsewhere.