Extending and Embedding PHP [Paperback]

Sara Golemon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 9, 2006

In just a few years PHP has rapidly evolved from a small niche language to a powerful web development tool. Now in use on over 14 million Web sites, PHP is more stable and extensible than ever. However, there is no documentation on how to extend PHP; developers seeking to build PHP extensions and increase the performance and functionality of their PHP applications are left to word of mouth and muddling through PHP internals without systematic, helpful guidance. Although the basics of extension writing are fairly easy to grasp, the more advanced features have a tougher learning curve that can be very difficult to overcome. This is common at any moderate to high-traffic site, forcing the company hire talented, and high-priced, developers to increase performance. With Extending and Embedding PHP, Sara Golemon makes writing extensions within the grasp of every PHP developer, while guiding the reader through the tricky internals of PHP.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Sara Golemon has been a core contributor to the PHP project since 2002, and is author of a dozen PECL extensions as well other other Open Source projects. She is actively involved in the planning and development of PHP6, and has written dozens of pages of the online manual including several whole reference sections and appendixes.

Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: Sams Publishing; 1 edition (June 9, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067232704X
• ISBN-13: 978-0672327049
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 1 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,096,797 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Very well done! October 21, 2007

By J. Weir

Format:Paperback

I purchased this book based on an immediate need at my job, and have since created two nice PHP extensions. I found it to be extremely helpful at getting started into an otherwise poorly documented area of PHP and the Zend API. It does lack depth in some areas, such as PHP5 objects. I found that consulting the source code of several existing PHP extensions was necessary to fill in some of these gaps.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Just about the only book for a long time February 13, 2010

By Jay

Format:Paperback

I work at a company where looking at source code is not an available means to decipher how things work. This book was the only way that I could accomplish my job of writing a custom PHP extension for connecting to our database product. In short, if it weren't for this book, I honestly don't know how I would have accomplished my job.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Crash course March 10, 2011

By frantik

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

If you need to write PHP extensions, you will need this book, simply because the information it contains is not available anywhere else. That being said, a lot of the content of this book feels like the kind of information that would normally be part of a free open source documentation.

The book assumes you are already somewhat familiar with PHP internals and basically "throws you in the deep end" right away. It is also aimed at C programmers (the language PHP is written in); if you only know PHP, you will probably have a hard time creating an extension using only the information contained in this book.

The book is also doesn't contain a lot of newer information, since it was written in 2006. Getting extensions to work with PHP 5.3 sometimes requires changes to old code that is not mentioned in this book.