Customer Reviews

PHP 6 Fast and Easy Web Development

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

 

 

I picked this book up at my local library since it was the first PHP 6 book they carried. I have to say, I completely agree with Michael Diamond's review. This book is why PHP code and PHP coders have a bad name. I would absolutely not hire someone who wrote any code like the examples in the book. The book is full of examples of how to make completely broken, utterly insecure and just downright awful PHP scripts. Throughout the book, examples take user input directly from $_POST or other user provided variables and either call functions provided in the variable, use the variable directly in SQL.

If the code could throw a warning, it is often preceded with an @ sign, which in PHP just suppresses the warning. Rather than show or explain to the reader how to either prevent the warnings from appearing, checking code to make sure the values passed to the function won't cause a warning or any of the other correct, standard, and not dangerous ways of preventing warnings from showing to the user, it just includes the @ sign with no explanation.

Throughout the book I don't recall seeing a single place where array variables are accessed correctly. For example,
if ($_SESSION[valid] != 'Yes') ....

Unless the word valid is a defined constant, PHP will try to find a constant with that name, not find any, issue a notice, and then try to use valid as a string. The correct way to do this check would be
if ($_SESSION['valid'] != 'Yes')...

Additionally, for a book that is supposed to be about PHP 6, very little PHP 6 is actually discussed anywhere. Unicode will be one of the biggest additions to the PHP 6 code, yet the only place that even mentions unicode is page 68 which has a little 3 line text box. The text in the box mentions that with PHP 6, unicode will be on by default, and then tells you how to disable it by changing an ini setting!

The code examples in this book are aimed at a beginner PHP programmer. However, a beginner PHP programmer may not know how wrongly they are being presented. I urge you, if you are a beginning PHP programmer to avoid this book. If you are a beginning programmer, avoid this book. If you are an intermediate to expert PHP programmer, avoid this book, or borrow it and laugh at the horrible examples of how to not code PHP.

I read a lot of PHP books. Since I've been coding PHP since 1997, there's usually not a lot that I learn from the PHP books. However, I usually also don't have such a strong reaction against a book that I have to immediately write an Amazon review urging others to avoid a book. In fact most of the other PHP books I've read or own do have a lot of good.

Please, stay away from this book. If you don't know PHP already, it will ruin you as a PHP programmer.

This book tries to teach PHP with an illogical ordering, piss poor documentation, no regard to security or standards (it's being published as a book for PHP 6, but still uses HTML from the 1990's).

Most notable to me, however, was the god aweful piece of code found in one of the introductory chapters which, if ever put on a live server, would open up the server to any number of exploits, including access to the system() function. Here is an excerpt:
echo $result = $_POST['func']($_POST['text1']);

Yes, that's right, output the result of a function call the client provides, applied to a parameter the client provides. Absolutely ridiculous.

Now, I haven't read much further than this example (p 110), but even if somewhere later on the authors take the time to discuss security, the fact that they separate the two all but guarentees that the message is not getting across. Please, please please do not purchase this book. I am returning it today, and I encourage those of you who made the same mistake I did to return it as well.

A far, far better book which covers PHP and MySQL in a professional, secure, and yet introductory fasion is PHP and MySQL Web Development (4th Edition) (Developer's Library). This is far and away my favorite programming book, and I promise anyone who is interested in learning PHP or MySQL will benefit from this book.

Pro: The text is written in a simple, straightforward style, and contains some good information
Con: Ridiculously small graphics depicting code (hint: just use listings); sample code from publisher's site is broken (perhaps I missed the part about having to debug the authors' examples); broken examples in the text; PHP6 is not stable as of publication of the book but we're set to a hack install thereof, and it appears the instructions on that little endeavor are broken too ("put that .dll in one of those folders you Windows people use").
Suggestion: Try the w3schools site. It's simple yet comprehensive, it's free, and they test their code. Or if you must have a dead tree, try Gosselin's PHP Programming with MySQL -- from what I have seen, it's a much better book.

By now you would think Meloni could/should get it right. No such luck her code is still broken. How anyone can write a series of books and still can't code herself is beyond me.

Not knowing exactly what PHP was but knowing I wanted to learn a new language I went to the bookstore and found this book. I don't know if anyone else has noticed but trying to find a good selection of programing books at the local bookstore is very hard. So I basically purchased this book by default because the selection I had was not very good. I haven't read the book page by page just flipped though the chapters and selected the ones I needed to learn.

For someone who was only familiar with HTML, CSS and copying and pasting JavaScript into my websites, this book taught me enough to help me implement a "Members Only" section of my website using log-on sessions as well help me understand enough code to create my own custom financial calculator. Although I did have to supplement with a few PHP web searches to help with some code that the book didn't cover. The book gives you a Basic PHP Language Reference in the appendix but the problem with that is it's just a list, it doesn't tell you how to implement it into your code. A perfect example was I needed to know how to round numbers, the book showed me the tag but I wasn't sure what to do with it.

This book is only to learn the basic functions of PHP. By no means will it show you how to make a dynamic website. Which will be my next PHP book purchase.
Yes, there are probably much better PHP books out there but it helped me enough to get started.

I'm new to PHP. When I started reading this book I noticed the author said that C was an object-oriented language along with Java. I was shocked because C is not an object-oriented language. I kept on reading and I found poor explanations about the examples. All the HTML code is in caps, I thought it was weird until I read some reviews from this website and realized this is a horrible book! I won't read this book any more.

Julie c Meloni. After 3rd publication and
you still didn't take serious enough about
your previously readers review. By 3rd
edition you should have already corrected
if not all, some critical negative, bad response
or error about the book. But seems here; you're NOT.
This proves that the author didn't care at all (so
why should you?).
If this kind of attitude still goes on and the
4th publication came out (PHP 7?), then the
author is not to be blamed but the publisher.
(And if it does happen, probably the publisher
is mad...soon, he/she will run his/her business dry.)

I don't remember if I bought this book on amazon or via my local bookstore. I usually look at reviews but my thought process was since I'm learning I'll start with PHP 6 so by the time it's released I will be ready. At the time I recall that there wasn't much of a selection. So I purchased this book and the best of hopes.

I'm about half way through the book now and discovered 2 errors in the code examples already. I'm sure this wouldn't be a problem for someone familiar with PHP but since I'm just learning I had spent hours looking over my code trying to figure out my mistakes. After searching online I discovered the error was not in my code but the example which was very frustrating. An additional problem I have encountered is there is not enough description what certain parts of the code does nor how the syntax works. So I'm going through the examples but not sure what every piece of code does.

Since I'm half way through I'm going to continue but I doubt that when I'm done I will have a good foundation to write my own code. While I hate writing bad reviews because of the time and effort put into a book I can't help but advise someone starting out in PHP not to purchase this book.

I have to say, this book is not horrible, but it's also not worth the money. Though the book does cover a handful of common and helpful code samples such as creating tables, inserting data into tables, adding users, working with sessions and creating simple mailing lists, I can't remember a single code example in this book that I didn't find a better, more detailed version of for free online.

The book is solid, they make a good effort guiding the reader and the examples are useful, but in a world where the internet is loaded with the same free simple code samples, a book like this doesn't serve much of a purpose. Go ahead and charge more if necessary, but I would have liked more complexity and explanation in the code samples. Don't be fooled by the number of pages - this thing could have easily been half the size.

I have to say that I have not purchased this book but am going to. I Went to my local bookstore and had a chance to look at the PHP 5 and PHP 6 books and the screen resolution the screenshots were taken in the PHP 6 book was really high. The text in the screenshots are really hard to read. I had a chance to look at the PHP 5 book and they were alot bigger. If you have a hard time reading small text I would suggest that you get the PHP 5 book.Other that that the content looks superb.