PHP 5 Fast & Easy Web Development [Paperback]

Julie C. Meloni (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1592004733 | ISBN-13: 978-1592004737 | Publication Date: May 11, 2004 | Edition: 1

Don't spend your time wading through manuals to learn PHP 5. Spend it doing what you do best - creating web pages! With "PHP 5 Fast & Easy Web Development" you can get up and running with PHP 5, Apache, and MySQL with ease. By the time you're finished, you'll be able to display dynamic content, build your own contact management system, create custom reports, work with XML, and much more. Less time, less effort, more results!

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Julie Meloni is the technical director for i2i Interactive, a multimedia company located in Los Altos, CA. SheÂ's been developing Web-based applications since the Web first saw the light of day and remembers the excitement surrounding the first GUI Web browser. She is the author of several books and articles on Web-based programming languages and database topics, and you can find translations of her work in several languages, including Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, and even Serbian.

Product Details

• Paperback: 568 pages
• Publisher: Course Technology PTR; 1 edition (May 11, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592004733
• ISBN-13: 978-1592004737
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #745,500 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "ok" for web developer, coding errors are troublesome, November 9, 2004

By 

Hope this helps "CL" (SD, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: PHP 5 Fast & Easy Web Development (Paperback)

This is an "ok" book for web developers. It has some nice features if you can get past the amount of errors in the coded examples and the sometimes confusing and contradictory explanations. There is very little discussion of basic concepts, therefore, I would not recommend this book for anyone who does not have some programming background.
The title, PHP 5 fast & easy web development, is indicative of the book's contents. It provides a series of potentially useful PHP scripts that you can adapt to develop database interactive web pages (emphasis is on the MySQL database). However, like the 2nd edition of Julie Meloni's "PHP fast & easy web development," this book is plagued with coding errors which are not only annoying, but also make understanding the various features of PHP more difficult.
The book starts with instructions on how to install PHP, Apache and MySQL. The remainder of the book consists of a series of increasingly complex scripts, detailed step-by-step. For the first half of the book, the examples are relatively easy to read and carefully documented. However, halfway through the book, segments of code begin to appear without adequate explanation, and as the book progresses, it becomes more a cookbook of code to retype rather than a clear explanation of what the code mean. Instructions about where to insert new lines of code are difficult to follow. In addition, some explanations appear contradictory, which adds to the confusion. The errors in the coded examples are excessive. I can understand a few typos, but lines of code that are substantially different or are missing completely can be found in every chapter. This is unacceptable and unprofessional in a book that is supposed to help you learn a new programming language.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not bad for an introduction - could use a little more detail, July 26, 2005

By 

Akm (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: PHP 5 Fast & Easy Web Development (Paperback)

This book is a descent introduction to PHP. It covered a lot of useful topics including sending email, file system functions, cookies/sessions and MySQL connections. The largest project in the book was a simple content management system. Even though basic programming concepts are covered as well I think it still helps to have at least a little familiarity with programming or scripting.

I only spotted a few minor errors throughout the book. For the most part all the examples worked smoothly. I did have some difficulties with the first three chapters in the book. These chapters dealt with installing PHP and MySQL. Many of the steps just didn't work as explained.

At 500 plus pages and 25 chapters it is a pretty long book and does cover a lot of material. Still, it doesn't seem to go to deep into the details of most of the covered material. There is a great appendix that helps with this somewhat. But because of the low price and since this book is only an introduction I can still easily recommend it. It's actually used as a textbook for one of the local Colleges.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Needs More Technical Reviewing, April 26, 2005

By 

Jon (Ann Arbor, MI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: PHP 5 Fast & Easy Web Development (Paperback)

This book is very problematic in the fact that, despite the author's claim of "three or four technical reviewers", there are coding problems which could have been easily caught by testing the code.

For example code given on pages 89-90 for a script generate errors abut undefined variables and . I double checked my code against the book and found no differences. I downloaded the source code from the author's web page and used that and received the same errors.

The author's website also makes it clear that she is somwhat unreceptive to these errors being pointed out when I went to the site advertised for her to see if there were any corrections and such. She does not even provide a means to contact her and from the tone of her "Contact Information" page, she does not take to kindly to being called on the carpet.

This book is definitely a work in progress and should not be purchased by anyone wanting to actually learn PHP.