Customer Reviews

Professional PHP4 XML

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book offers an incredible guide and reference to everything you can do with XML and PHP. Not only does this book cover the fundamentals of XML, such as SAX, DOM, XPATH and XSLT, but it covers rich topics like Apache Xindice, advanced XML storage techniques, XML-RPC, SOAP and a variety of both functional and object-oriented approaches to all these concepts.

At IBM, we have always been a strong advocator of PHP for being the perfect language for connecting to databases over the web and offering dynamic content and services. It's simple, elegant, easy and effective. Even further, IBM has always explored XML within PHP and has advocated the use of PHP with our DB2 product.

This book takes your existing PHP skills in HTML and databases and brings them to a whole new level. By taking your current knowledge and adding XML into the mix, this book will truely help you think creatively and create more complex applications. Even given all the hype around "Web Services", this book takes an incredible look into XML-RPC and SOAP. The authors have done, in my opinion, a fantastic job.

I give this book 5 stars because it truely deserves such a rating. The book is absolutely solid. If you want to learn anything from the fundamentals of XML all the way to Web Services, this book will show you the path and everything in-between.

I've purchased many PHP books over the years, learning PHP and programming from the ground up. I've just started dabbling with XML and I needed a resource that would get me going on the right footing. After a bit of searching, I decided to purchase Professional PHP4 XML and I must say, this book told me everything I wanted to know and more! As I read each chapter, I gained new insight into how XML and it's various technologies could make me a better programmer, designer and could help my client's projects. By taking the author's advice, I even gained new insight to programming some tools to make my job easier as a whole. These guys are truely brilliant and well experienced with PHP and XML - truely the leaders in their respective field.

Given that I was new to XML, I started at the beginning and worked my way through the book. Outside of the chapter on SVG graphics, I found this book to engage in everything I was looking for and more. Every page is filled with insight and the DOM chapter even has notes for PHP 4.3.0! Talk about the Wrox crew planning in advance! It is obvious they put a great deal of work into making sure this book is to last.

Since I'm a businessman as well as a programmer, I gained valuable insight from manner of the chapters as it appears these authors are pretty smart business people as well. By seeing all perspectives in a consistent, seemless and non-bloated manner, I can honestly say I feel like a true expert with XML technologies. The book provides many examples, clearly explained as well as well written. Given the book outlines OO examples with the functional ones, I could see both paradigms being demonstrated together. This approached has engage me and my fellow programmers to write more OO code. This book has pretty much revolutionized my way of programming and thinking. I'd recommend it to any PHP programmer, regardless of their experience.

Fantastic book!

Pros & Cons...
- Comes with an index of XML technologies and how and where to apply them in PHP; this is quality advice for the PHP programmer who doesn't have the time to read all the W3 specs, but who does need be sure that they're using the right XML tool for the job.

- SAX/DOM/XPATH/XSLT are all given an in-depth review from a PHP programmer's viewpoint. Found this helpful in compelling me to start using these technologies more, mainly because these examples are out-of-the-box useful.

- I'm probably not alone in sometimes feeling overwhelmed by XML in terms of 'what, how and where' the database fits and what the datbase does. Most PHP programmers I know are attached at the hip to MySQL (& postgres), so when this book touches on where those databases overlap (intentionally or not?) it's a big help. It's by no means exhaustive but was sufficient to aid comprehension of the many APIs -- specifically how to use them in dealing with the output/input of XML from RDBMs.

- Enjoyed and found interesting the chapter on SOAP use, along with some neat PHP samples, both useful and less so. One shows how to auto-generate SOAP requests using XSLT on a WSDL file. This chapter also tries to clear the thick fog about how everything will be put together in a world of web services (called SOA -- Service Orientated Architecture).

- You won't need 3-4 different books, as XSLT/XPATH/SAX/XML/DOM
are listed with relevant PHP commands as appendixes.

- The SVG chapter may someday prove useful but not today. I don't use it or expect to need it, honestly.

- XML-RPC is heavily covered as you'd expect. The rather large case study attempted to show how everything *could* dovetail neatly.

To analogize (though it's admittedly a bit of a stretch), this book is to PHP programmers what Michael Kay's reference book is to XSLT programmers, though achieved with completely different styles. If you're a confident/curious/cantankerous PHP programmer who needs to know quickly how and where to apply these technologies, I'd highly recommend it.

"PHP XML" does a great job of covering a little bit of everything you can accomplish using PHP and XML. There's so much to cover, though, that a thorough, in-depth discussion of each is impossible in the scope of one book. Rather, the book teaches a programmer enough about the various technologies that they are much better prepared to make initial design decisions in their projects, and have enough example code to get their feet wet with the code to implement those decisions.

I'd recommend the book to anyone who'd like a convenient all-in-one-place reference to XML-related technologies and how PHP interacts with them. The book enables a developer to not just pick a tool because it's available, but to make intelligent decisions about which tool is best for their purposes.

It also gives one enough of a head start that understanding much deeper and more technical information on the web or in other books (XSLT Programmers Reference 2nd Edition, Pro PHP4, etc...) becomes easier to digest.

I echo the praise already given in detail by the other reviewers here. This book gives an excellent detailed account of XML technology as well as the application of XML in combination with PHP. I was completely new to XML and found the text easy to follow and the concepts were easily applied by examining the example code. Please note that this is NOT a book for those new to PHP, it is for an experienced PHP programmer (in my opinion). It does give an overview of many aspects of PHP, but if you are brand new to PHP, I would recommend starting with a Beginning PHP text. Beginning PHP4 by Wrox is an excellent place to start. There are several others. If you're familiar with PHP, though, and looking to expand your skills or your project to include XML, this text is the place to look.

The book features the most solid documentation on core XML technologies that i have ever read:
The SAX chapter is very interesting read because it goes beyond the installation of the SAX libraries and learning how to use the functions. Covering Expat, the chapter explains a great deal about how to use the less uncommon functions like xml_set_notation_decl_handler(), xml_set_external_entity_ref_handler() and the others effectively. Also of note, the diagrams and code examples were very clear and well done in this chapter. The chapter also looks at writing a properly modeled object-oriented SAX parser using eXtremePHP and covers common problems like removing whitespace, handling erroneous XML input and extending the white box infrastructure within eXtremePHP to create very powerful, yet elegant, XML Parsers.The DOM chapter covers the latest DOM extensions introduced in PHP 4.2.1 and even provides code examples and heads up information on what is to come in PHP 4.3.0. The chapter introduces what DOM is and even shows the reader a beautiful diagram illustrating how all the functions relate to an example. By simply looking at this, you can get a feel for how to use DOM almost immediately. The chapter continues to discuss how to enable DOM within your PHP installation on both Windows and UNIX and looks at the real-world advantages and disadvantages to using DOM over SAX. Next, the chapter explains the new DOM object model and looks at the underlying architecture before diving into any code examples. This information sets up the rest of the chapter, making it a lot easier for non-object oriented programs to visualize what methods belong to what objects and understanding the data relationships of the DOM tree. The chapter then presents a lot of code examples. First, it illustrates how many of the methods and functions of the DOM library work and then covers more complicated examples, illustrating how to parse, create and modify DOM documents with and without using HTML forms. The chapter closes with a pretty comprehensive look into the limitations of the DOM standard, explaining to the reader what the boundaries are, common problems with the API yet unfixed and provides future directions the library might take to correct many of the architectural, standards-based and object-oriented capabilities within the library.

Kudos to everyone that made this book happen.

I've been an advocator of PHP for as long as I can remember. Although many of my colleagues have taken heart to Java, I still am a strong advocator of open-source technologies and PHP is one of the most interesting. I was looking for a good reference about PHP and XML since many of my students have also been interested in doing some web development work along side of their academic circullum. Having come to me, I suggested that they learned PHP since it was easy to use and you could start building complex applications with the platform right from the get go. After having my students learn Professional PHP4 Programming last semester, I also thought the students really needed to expand their knowledge, so I purchased several copies of Professional PHP4 XML to review so I could recommend a good book for PHP and XML. After reviewing the book for the past few days, I must say I was incredibly impressed. I have shown the book to a few of my avid students and convinced them they should get the book to advance their careers. Knowing PHP and XML professional will be a great boost for them early on in their academic and professional careers and I can think of no practical books better than Wrox's Professional PHP4 XML.

When this book first arrived, I was absolutely astonished. This book has incredible breath and depth of all the topics possible concerning XML and it's exact use in the PHP programming language. If you are a new PHP programmer or even a wizard, there bound to be a lot of material for you to consume. The structure of the book flows perfectly as each chapter prepares you for what is to come and articulates their topics in great detail that is extremely easy to understand. The book is filled with useful examples that you put to work right away, is filled with useful comments to help you from getting trapped in common and some not-so common pitfalls. I must say, this is not only the best PHP and XML available today (much better than the New Riders one), but it's probably the best Wrox book I've read all year. Congrats to the authors on making this book an excellent read. This one is very engaging and I learned a great deal!

Wrox Press seem to have become masters at putting together volumes from a large number of authors. This 600-page volume is another example. This way of working does have some drawbacks, there is a little repetition of some basic stuff throughout the book, but not enough to truly detract from it.

The book, after some expository material, details 11 projects of increasing complexity. They use PHP, MySQL, PEAR::DB, Smarty and PHPLib. The target audience, according to the book jacket, are programmers who already have a good knowledge of PHP, SQL Databases and XML. Frankly, I think they overdo the amount of experience you need to use and benefit from this book. If you are on top of all those topics well enough to consider yourself ¡°professional¡± then this book may be too simple. If, on the other hand, you are, like me, conversant with PHP and SQL but would like to take yourself up to ¡°professional¡± use of technologies like XML, templating and WAP enabling then this book will be good

PHP itself is usually very straightforward and easy to understand, but throw in the world of XML and things can become overwhelming very quickly. DOM, RSS, SAX, XPath, XSLT, XSL, XML-RPC - wow! Professional PHP4 XML will answer the questions "What is XML?" and "How do I use XML within PHP?"

The book starts off with a nice introduction to PHP, including the use of classes and file functions. It isn't meant to teach you everything you need to know about PHP, but to be refresher course for information that will be used throughout the book. It was nice to see the promotion of the new superglobal arrays in this section of the book.

Next, they jump into a chapter devoted to XML Fundamentals. This chapter explains the rules and syntax that a well-formed XML document must adhere to. DTDs and Schemas are discussed as methods to validate XML documents as well as define XML vocabularies. All in all, after reading this chapter you should have a good base to build upon for the rest of the book.

The rest of the book is devoted to giving you detail on the different derivatives of XML and how and when do use them with PHP. Topics covered include:

* SAX via PHP's Expat parser
* DOM
* XPath
* XSL via Sablotron
* Third party class for PHP such as XML File and phpXML
* RSS
* XML and databases
* SVG
* XML-RPC

One of the things I love about this book is that for each of these XML derivatives, they provide a detailed list of advantages and disadvantages. This enables you to determine which of these technologies is best suited for the application you are designing.

This book is an excellent resource for the beginner and advanced programmer alike. It is a mixture of a tutorial and reference book without comprising either. If you are serious about developing applications with PHP and XML, this book should be in your collection.