Customer Reviews

PHP Fast & Easy Web Development

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

This is an absolutely fabulous book for beginning PHP. If only they made books like this for every scripting language. The examples are simple, easy to understand and hell, they work! PHP is a pretty complex language but this book dives right into the core of what you need to know about CGI with PHP. Even if it doesn't explain the code in depth enough it at least allows the user to have a basic grasp of what the language is doing with line-by-line explainations. The section on mySQL is very complete and should allow the reader to take off running with mySQL, plus when you are done with the exercise, you have a web interface for mySQL that you can use indefinately. Any experienced perl programmer will be able to see the advantages of PHP just by thumbing the pages (me for example).

The only reason I give it four stars is because of the annoying blue text - please tell me this was a mistake. The HUGE TEXT was a turn off as well, reads like a child's book. I'll take it though and I recomend it to all BEGINNERS in PHP.

PHP Fast & Easy it is! What Julie C. Meloni does is lead you by the hand as you type in the code (which you often don't understand until several pages later) and learn PHP character by bloody character. I came to this book with a firm background in HTML but only brief forays into programming and scripting. This book let me see the logic of it all and had me writing useful scripts before I was halfway through. It falls down in a couple things: 1. Installation turned out to be more difficult than Meloni predicted. I had a wayward .dll file and no way to find out why PHP wasn't working. Meloni tried to help through email (how many authors would do that?!?!). Eventually, I stumbled on the problem and all was better. 2. Searching a database is only just barely touched upon. Why else would you have a database than to be able to search it? This could easily be an entire book, of course, but this one could have gone into that a little further. In summary, it's a really great way to start PHP and gives a solid foundation to continue. Best of all, it leaves you excited about this tool, wanting to know all the ways to use it best.

This book does exactly what it says it will, buy this book and you'll be up and running with PHP in less than an hour. It's a really quick read with good explanations, even includes a CD with mySQL 3.22 and PHP4.

Unfortunately, it lacks the technical depth needed to do anything productive. So experienced programmers-- look elsewhere; you probably want something more complex than this book will offer.

The author has constructed example exercises beginning with the basics and moving on to form submission, error checking and database management. You will want to sit down in front of your computer and dig in! Examples support both the Windows and Linux OS. In the first chapter, you will use the CD-ROM included to set up your own Apache Web Server with PHP4 and MySQL! This make the entire process easy for anyone to use, right on your own machine. Some basic knowledge of open-source programming is helpful as details on errors that you encounter are pretty skinny. The book assumes that each example works and moves on. PHP does help you through this as each error will echo a parse error indicating the line that you need to fix. With a little patience and some basic knowledge of scripting such as Javascript or Perl, you will learn to use PHP4 in no time!

This is an interesting book, written with a casual easy going style that will no doubt appeal to some people, particularly i would guess, hobbyists who are trying to get a dynamic website with PHP up for the first time. Although the publisher Prima Tech doesn't provide any sort of skill level rating, make no mistake, this is a book for beginners only.

PHP fast&easy web development assumes that you will be using mysql as a database, which is fine, but not clearly stated on the front cover. The author has a website with some decent articles on using other databases with PHP which somewhat mitigates the issue.

One of the things that bothered me about PHP fast&easy is that the author seems relatively agnostic about what features of the language one *should use*. PHP is a highly flexible, loosely typed language with numerous pitfalls that a beginning developer can fall deep into, yet these areas are never acknowledged or discussed.

To illustrate this, a beginning section discusses the ways that PHP code can be intermixed with HTML, and the special tag syntax required. While she lists <? ?> as being an acceptable block, she never informs the reader, that they shouldn't use this syntax and should instead use <?php ?>. She then shows the use of the echo command for outputting text, using the " character to surround text, not mentioning that one can also use ' and that this helps avoid the perils of having to escape all instances of the " character when echoing embedded HTML.

In a later chapter the author shows how one could create some forms with the ability to create mysql databases and tables, never mentioning that a mysql user connecting through PHP with this type of access to a database is a huge security risk. She also illustrates the use of cookies, by setting a security variable of auth=yes, never covering how with PHP's automatic variable creation, anyone with a small amount of understanding of this feature could easily subvert this security scheme by passing auth=yes as a url parameter.

The first 50 pages of the book cover installing apache, mysql and php. This is great if you need this help, however, if you don't it's just filler in what is already a sparce tomb. The last 60 pages provide a tutorial in creating a primitive contact management system. This does a fair job of showing the basics of developing an online form based system, although I'd certainly prefer a more interesting sample applicaion, perhaps similar to the cd collection database used in earlier examples (mp3's come to mind).

Personally, I'd prefer a book that uses its source code to provide hints in regards to best practices, even if the concepts are beyond those which can be adequately dealt with in an introductory volume. All the source code in PHP fast&easy web development is of the rudimentary variety.

There is decent coverage of PHP's session capability. Unfortunately, things that might have been covered but aren't include: PHP's somewhat unusual variable scoping mechanism (globals aren't visible inside functions); user defined functions; the include function; PHP classes and objects; the power and use of regular expression functions; a normalized database (ie. use of more than one table) etc... you get the idea. PHP, like perl, is a swiss army knife, capable of many amazing things, and this book barely covers the spoon.

In conclusion, if you have even a modicum of programming background I suspect you will be sorely dissappointed in this book. If you're a rank beginner who wants to get a toe in the water with PHP, then you may find this a decent entry point. Expect however, to supplement the tutorials contained here with additional reference materials and reading.

This is one of the best beginner PHP books I've seen. It has a nice visual layout and it addresses both Windows and Linux users. You'll find a great walk-through for building scripts that do the following: generate messages to HTML pages, work with system variables, connect to a database (MySql), create/modify/delete tables and records for the database, work with cookies, and more.

There's no fluff in this book. It does not waste your time explaining normalization or database design. (If you need to learn about those things, then get a book about databases.) Also, I liked seeing all the references placed neatly in the back of the book, instead of sprinkled distractingly throughout the lesson examples.

The only thing I saw missing was a comment that could have been made about the .php file extension. (Throughout the book, .php is used. However, some host providers (like mine!) use PHP3 and this requires giving your files a .php3 extension instead.)

Overall though, the book is excellent. My goal was to build a shopping cart that would work with a database. By using this book, I was able to build the table and record creation scripts very quickly. If you're a master programmer, you might find the book too easy. However, I appreciated the clarity and ease in which the content was delivered, and I think most beginners will appreciate it as well.

I actually bought "Professional PHP Programming" out of Wrox Publishing as my very first PHP book to help me learn it. I had SO many problems grasping many of the areas that I actually walked away from learning PHP for a month. It's a good book, but there is just too much detail information in there for the newbie. Then I went out and bought PHP Fast & Easy. It made it so easy that I couldn't put the book down! This is easily the most useful web development book I ever bought. You'd have to be brain dead to have any trouble learning PHP with this book sitting in front of you.

This should be the Number 1 Best Seller!

There is just not enough advertising out on this book! Some marketeer needs to pick up this book and run with it on commission.

I have two other books on PHP. One for PHP3 and One for PHP4. I had a bit of trouble with the other two, a friend suggested this one and WOW it has made things so simple. This book will jump start you into PHP no matter what level you are at!

Thanks to the Author Julie, this is the best book I have ever read in programming. Information step by step like this is invaluable. This is like winning the lottery!

Also, If you have thought about Using PHP, MySql and Apache then get this book now!

This is a good book to start out with, especially if you don't have much programming experience. It shouldn't be the only PHP book you buy.

It's easy to follow the examples and you don't have to read anything twice. It's basically a follow me book with lots of screenshots. "1. Open a new file in your text editor. 2. Start a PHP block <? " and so on throughout the book.

If you buy this book, you probably should buy a more advanced book at the same time, since it won't keep you busy for very long. This book is part of the publishers' "fast and easy web development series", and the book really is fast and easy to read.

However, the follow me style, layout (around 20 lines per page), lots of white space and many browser screenshots taking up half or more of many pages, makes it a bit too thin for my taste. The 400+ pages feel more like 150. I find it a bit annoying that even if a browser screenshot only has one line of text, it still has like 15 blank lines, so the screenshot takes up almost half the page anyway. But you feel really smart when you go through the pages in no time at all.

All in all, this is a good book to get up to speed with PHP, as they say on the back cover. Since the target group is beginner/intermediate, they've done a good job. Now that I'm up to speed, I'll give this book to a friend and buy a more advanced book that I can use as a reference.

This is an extraordinarily helpful and well-written book for the person who wants to move from static web pages to data driven pages. Each step is carefully explained in detail, and each chapter builds a useful category of web page, so that you find yourself moving very quickly into doing useful work. I started out learning PHP with a different book and was bogged down with esoteric details, but when I went back to PHP with this book everything fit and everything worked. For those who do not yet have Apache, PHP and MySql on their machines, the book furnishes a CD with these programs for both Linux and Windows, along with the usual detailed explanation of how to install and configure them. At some point you will probably want to get a more advanced book to do wild and crazy things, but if you are like me, you will still find yourself coming back to this one to be sure you got it right. Great book!