5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Book, February 17, 2012
This review is from: PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner's Guide (Paperback)
I enjoyed reading and building along with the book "PHP and MongoDB Web Development". The book is logically organized and contains many helpful hints and tutorials. I felt the content appropriately addressed the target audience, individuals with some background in web development looking to increase their exposure to a new technology. For me, the best part of the book is the useful examples and exercises, specifically using MongoDB to implement a session manager for clustered web applications, geospacial indexing, and web analytics with asynchronous writes. I found the exercises given in the book to be very relevant to the strengths of MongoDB. Furthermore, the book gives a good introduction to the Map/Reduce concept and provides good examples for those who may not be familiar with it.
I thought the author did a nice job of illustrating the fact that while MongoDB has many benefits, it's not the perfect fit for every need. There are even times when it can and should be used with a relational database system and the author gives examples of when this would be an effective use and when it would not. The book provides good resources for those readers wanting to delve a bit deeper into more advanced uses and aspects of MongoDB.
Overall, I found "PHP and MongoDB Web Development" to be an excellent reference for building applications with MongoDB. I would, and will, recommend this book to all of my developer colleagues.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Great intro to MongoDB and NoSQL, January 31, 2012
This review is from: PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner's Guide (Paperback)
Today (January 30, 2012), I have finished reading the book 'PHP and MongoDB Web Development'. This book is a great intro to MongoDB and NoSQL.
There's no special knowledge required to read this book. If you have a background in relational databases and wish to learn more about MongoDB or are interested in it as an example of a NoSQL implementation, this is a great book.
This is what the book covers:
> Installation of MongoDB (chapter 1)
In chapter 1, Getting Started with MongoDB, you will learn how to install and run your first MongoDB server. You will find an easy to follow step-by-step guide on how to install it on your platform of choice. Within an hour (maximum), you should be ready to go!
This chapter also learns you the basic concepts of MongoDB and NoSQL. With a relational database background it's fairly easy to grasp.
> Building a blogger web application (chapter 2-5)
In the following chapters you will learn how to build a blogger web application using PHP, HTML (CSS) and MongoDB as the backend database. In these chapters you will learn all the basic database operations like Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD).
Building your First MongoDB Powered Web App (Chapter 2) will fresh up your memory, on the functionality that is required for a basic blogger application. You will create pages to insert/update a blog article, get an articles overview and create a blogger dashboard.
In the next chapter you will learn how to implement a generic Session Manager for handling user authentication in the blogging web app. You will also create the login, logout and profile page for the blogger application.
In chapter 4 (Aggregation Queries) you will learn about MapReduce, a design pattern for data processing. It will be used to create the Tag Cloud for the blogger app. You will also find an example on how to create an overview "average rating per author".
At this point the very simple blogger web application is completed. In this next chapter (Web Analytics using MongoDB) you will learn how to store website analytics in MongoDB. You will basically implement a simple pageview counter for the blogger app.
> Using MongoDB (6-8)
Chapter 6, Using MongoDB with Relational Databases, will challenge you to use both MongoDB and MySQL (or any other relational database). Potential use cases where MongoDB can be employed alongside a relational database system are: data archiving, logging, storing entity metadata and storing results of aggregation queries.
GridFS is MongoDB's solution for storing binary data in the database (Chapter 7, Handling Large Files with GridFS). You will see a few examples on how to serve files (images) from GridFS.
In the following chapter (Chapter 8,Building Location-aware Web Applications with MongoDB and PHP) you will learn about the feature Geo-spatial indexing. It can be used to build location-aware web applications with it, like the popular application Foursquare have done. If you follow the step-by-step example, you will have your own location-aware service in minutes using PHP, JavaScript, MongoDB and Google Maps.
> Security, Performance and Database administration (chapter 9-10)
Chapter 9 (Improving Security and Performance) will teach you how to manage your database server and how to optimize your database. At first you will see how you can add user authentication (disabled by default) and improve the security of a MongoDB server. You will also learn how to implement index keys to boost performance.
In the final chapter (Chapter 10, Easy MongoDB Administration with RockMongo and phpMoAdmin) you will learn about tools for administering a MongoDB server. You will see that both RockMongo and phpMoAdmin provide an easy way to explore, manipulate or import and export your data. The comparison of RockMongo versus phpMoAdmin at the end of the chapter is very useful.
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Final Thoughts
This book is great in learning you the concepts of MongoDB by doing: less theory, more results. It is definitely a good beginner's guide for PHP and MongoDB web development.
The book is easy to read, thanks to the easy-to-understand concept of creating a blogger web application. Since most developers already understand the basic functionality, you can focus more how to do it using MongoDB.
While reading the book, I already downloaded the C# driver to do some more experimenting with MongoDB server. Preparing the environment (.NET/C#) turned out to be easy, and within half an hour I was able to play with MongoDB server using my own favorite language (C#). At that point, this book is also useful as a reference for the basic instructions.
I'm coming from a traditional relational database background, specializing in SQL server over the last 12 years. I was hoping that this book was a good introduction to NoSQL in general and it is was! I can recommend this book if you're interested in learning the basic concepts of a NoSQL database.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful Intro to Mongo Book for Web Developers, January 27, 2012
This review is from: PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner's Guide (Paperback)
This was a great book for those looking to get their feet wet with MongoDB. PHP And MongoDB covered many more topics than many of the MongoDB books I have read recently and while I am not a PHP developer gave me a few more ways to leverage MongoDB in my day to day work.
I especially enjoyed the chapters on Geospatial functionality and the GridFS system. Both of these topics we handled throughly and are typically glossed over in other books.
The one place I felt this book was light was the operations and administration side of things. Nowadays, many developers are handling operations as well and I feel that those topics could be explored further in books like this.
All in all, I would recommend anyone in web development looking for somewhere to start with MongoDB pick up this book and give it a read.
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