Customer Reviews

PHP: The Good Parts: Delivering the Best of PHP

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

 

 

O'Reilly's "The Good Parts" series began with Crockford's outstanding "JavaScript: The Good Parts," which established a very high standard for a book claiming to detail the good parts of a technology. In "The Good Parts," Crockford detailed a great many things that were fundamentally wrong in the definition and practice of JavaScript and how it was possible to carefully use a well-chosen subset of the language, "the good parts" to achieve more professional results.

If there's any modern programming language that's more synonymous with bad architecture and poor real-world practices than JavaScript, it's PHP. The top tier of PHP programmers acknowledge this and work in environments that rigorously enforce coding standards meant to protect them from the bad parts of PHP.

I turned to "PHP: The Good Parts" with the hopes that it might detail these kinds of standards and practices. Instead, I found a through-the-looking-glass view into a cheerleader world where PHP is "nothing but good" and the author is at a loss to think of anything wrong with the language.

One could blame this on the author, but I'm inclined to blame it on the publisher. O'Reilly, did you really not know that you had something special going with "the good parts" and that the title promised a book by a master showing the benefit of a lot of experience? Or, did you cynically think that the general level of PHP programming expertise is so low that nobody would notice the difference?

"The Good Parts" series, as established by Douglas Crockford, set a high standard that helped any JavaScript developer move up one or more levels in their craft by gaining a clear understanding of what was good _and bad_ about JavaScript. As an experienced JS developer with over a decade of pure JavaScript experience I found almost nothing to criticize about that book and was reminded of a few subtleties I'd forgotten over the years. It was a perfect refresher for me and a great introduction for anyone less experienced in what to avoid.

This book does nothing of the sort.

Unlike JavaScript, I'm completely new to PHP. I've never written a single line of the stuff. Going on the basis of my experience with Crock's book I had hoped to get a useful introduction to PHP and a clear view of the minefield that experienced programmers realize exists in every language. This book blew smoke in every direction; the author even wasted my time by claiming he couldn't really think of any bad parts. I wish I'd seen that comment when scanning the book in the bookstore, I could have saved myself a lot of time and $.

From a pure beginner perspective simple things like the '.' operator for string concatenation are never explained, they just start appearing in code samples. In terms of language introduction there's fragmented coverage of the core language constructs, scattered coverage of basic string and array functions with no summaries or API/signature examples, and no coverage of generally accepted PHP coding standards (the samples in the book don't use "fully bracketed ifs" for example). I don't feel like reading this book allows me to do anything other than go in search of another introductory book on PHP armed with some idea of what _not_ to buy.

If I were an experienced PHP programmer I can't imagine I would have found anything of value in this book. The language coverage is so basic I presume it's common knowledge to anyone who's used PHP for any period of time. At the same time there are no minefield topics worth discussing with the possible exception of the discussion around the admittedly questionable decision to add 'goto' to PHP 5.3.

As someone who's done OO development in a half-dozen other languages I'd have to say Chapter 6, on OO in PHP, should be torn out and run through a shredder. It's the worst coverage of OO I think I've ever seen in print. Unfortunately, subsequent chapters refer to Chapter 6 as if it taught you something that you'd need to know.

All in all this book has to be one of the worst O'Reilly titles I've ever read...and I've read over 100 over the years. Admittedly ORA has been disappointing me more and more often in recent years, but not all of what's wrong with this book can be laid at the publisher's feet.

Perhaps this is all just a reaction to expectations set by the title which were completely unmet. Consider yourself warned however. If you think this book is going to give you the same meaty-yet-concise treatment of PHP that Crock did for JS you're going to be very disappointed.

The author clearly never read Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts, or at least if he did he missed the point entirely. Crockford's book served as a map to guide you through the best ways to use Javascript without falling into pitfalls. Javascript, a language programmers have been raised to detest due to shoddy examples abusing the worst parts of the language, started to see its reputation turn around when Crockford's book hit the shelves. Crockford made a strong case that underneath it's Bad Parts lie a beautiful language that programmers can find joy in.

No such case is made in this book. In fact, a good chunk of this book is dedicated to building some project involving an SMS gateway instead of talking about the language semantics that make PHP what it is. The author's claim that he doesn't think there are any Bad Parts to PHP (in the "Bad Parts" appendix) shows he has not worked with many other programming langauges, if any, than PHP. I have a hard time believing the choice for the title of this book was meant for any reason other than to sucker people in (like myself) who loved Crockford's book and expected a similar "clean slating" for the other much loathed language of the web, PHP.

I was hoping for an in-depth discussion of the details of the language, the design choices its author made, and how to avoid common traps when writing PHP code. I wanted to see what functions and constructs to avoid, and what patterns were common enough to use idiomatically. Instead what I got was a basic introduction to the simplest concepts in the language ("Objects" being the epic crescendo of this grand tour) and many pages of rambling on about some SMS project. I would have read through it in more detail if it weren't for the author's ridiculously bad security through obscurity advice peppered throughout, which I'll spare him the pain of seeing reprinted here.

If you want to learn PHP, pick up another book. If you want someone to dissect the language for you and tell you how to write Good PHP instead of Bad, well, I guess we'll just have to wait for that book to be written. It's a shame someone has already taken the title it'll need.

Maybe it is because I have a lot of programming experience that I find this book poor and it may well cover things that the novice won't find in the weightier tomes but I felt a bit a bit let down by this book. I was hoping I would learn some neat PHP tricks and producitivy hacks or some best practices in how to organise code and build applications. Instead you get some very short examples of core functions and how to use them. $_GET and $_POST are not "the good parts" of PHP. They are the fundamentals. This book would be useful for a complete newcomer to the language who already has experience of another non-similar language or an intermediate PHP user perhaps migrating from an older version of the language.

Pluses of this book:
+ Well written accessible
+ Gives examples of some Basic and Basic-to-Intermediate features of PHP

Minuses
- Not enough detail for complete novices
- Not anything more than in the PHP online manual
- Not much useful for intermediate PHP users
- Use of MD5
- Very short

This book is a reasonable concise introduction to PHP for developers of other languages, but I was expecting more. The title gives the impression that it will be the PHP equivalent of Douglas Crockford's seminal JavaScript: The Good Parts. It's not. Many of the topics discussed aren't necessarily what many PHP developers would consider to be good.

Read my full review here:
[...]

Great book but I feel it was rushed, the author has great ideas but they are just not covered in depth as I would have liked considering the title of the book.

Informative and concise - it may not be a replica of the JavaScript book, but it'll serve as a handy reference.

I'm new to PHP and thought this book might serve as a decent introduction. Up until Chapter 6 on Objects, I was right. Then things got very hairy very quickly.

Since I'm a beginner, it might be best to take my review with a grain - or several - of salt. But immediately after introducing the basic concepts of OOP, the author launches into four pages of very dense code. It includes some very sparse comments intended to be helpful. However, the code continues on and concludes without much in the way of explanation. The author does say that he only intended a brief introduction showing the power and simplicity of OOP. I was left feeling mostly clueless; luckily I know from other languages just how powerful OOP can be.

I'd be interested to see what the author has to say about this and update the review then. After looking through the final chapters, it's clear that the book returns to its good form, so at least worthy of four stars for doing what it set out to do. I just feel that this chapter interrupted the stride of the book and could use some improvement in future editions.

Peter B. MacIntyre's PHP: THE GOOD PARTS provides an easy introduction perfect for any newcomer and for any library that seeks a basic coverage of the programming language's syntax, variables and more. From using strings and PHP's special functions to understanding how it interacts with databases and hot to prevent security breaches, this includes PHP 5.3 Good Parts and is a winner for any programming collection.