Customer Reviews

FileMaker Web Publishing: A Complete Guide to Using the API for PHP

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

 

 

If you are just starting out using FileMaker with the web it's a must read. It shows several outstanding techniques for setting up pages.

This is a very good book for beginners in FileMaker and PHP. It puts down a good foundation for starting but like so many other books it starts out with several chapters explaining the extreme basics so you are half way through the book before you get to the meat of the topic. Once the books starts getting in to the functions of PHP with FileMaker it stops just short of a little more involved explanation. I don't mean for that to sound like a rip on the book, but would like to see a little more advanced book on this subject.
Like I said I think this was a very well written book and covered the topic well I was just hoping for something a little more advanced.

To say it's the best resource to the FM PHP API is an oversimplification. It's really the ONLY resource that could be considered any kind of a starting point. FileMaker has not done a great job of providing documentation to this powerful tool. Let's hope they improve on that.

That being said, this book is already somewhat out of date. It uses a number of deprecated or to be deprecated calls to the API that take some time to figure out how to work around (and due to the lack of good documentation, this can be challenging).

The greatest frustration I have with this book is that every section covering a concept is accompanied by a lot of screenshots of code. These screen shots tend to be vital to understanding how the code is constructed. However, the screenshots are so small they are almost impossible to read. I've had to increase lighting and pull out a magnifier to make out what many of the images are trying to tell me. What is wrong with providing written out code in a monospaced typeface like every other code book does? The screenshots appear to be a lazy shortcut to providing this. It's extremely annoying.

This IS a good resource. If you plan to learn about the API, it will help. The reasons above are why it gets 3 stars. It would get 5 if the above problems can be resolved.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Allyson, Stephen and Michael have put together an invaluable resource for putting FileMaker data on the web via PHP. The book is very well written with extremely clear example that are easy to follow. As a bonus, it's also a survey of html and css, too.

If Amazon allowed a 6-star rating, this book would have earned it. Great job, guys!