Customer Reviews

Extending and Embedding PHP

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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.

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.

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.

This book is, rightfully so, the definitive guide on creating your own php extensions. Golemon definitely knows her stuff and by the end of this book you will too! Just be prepared, it's a LOT of information, really fast...expect your head to hurt while reading.