Customer Reviews

Professional PHP5 (Programmer to Programmer)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

First, visit wrox dot com and download the sample code that is available for free on their site.

If you think you want this book, you probably already have php5/Apache/mySQL installed on your development workstation.

Unzip the sample code, browse it using your favorite IDE. Note the usage of PostgreSQL instead of MySQL. Take a shot at executing the very simple OO sample files in the first chapter. Notice the syntax errors, the use of depracated functions, and errors in filenaming.

This book was rushed through development, much like most poorly developed applications. Very much a shame. I bought the book based off of previous Amazon reviews but failed to visit the user forum on the wrox site.

You'll notice there that the topic of greatest interest for this book is that of disappointment in it's development. In print for most of this year and not a single errata to correct the carelessness of the authors' inattention to detail.

0 stars for typos.

0 stars for poor sample code.

0 stars for the editors.

1 star for providing great general reference in the non-code oriented chapters.

1 star for giving me the chance to fix the errors in sample code and offering it up to wrox in exchange for refund of this purchase.

Be warned. This is a great reference book, the code is bukaki.

OK, first off, I'll be totally honest - I am the lead author of this book. So, of course, I'm going to give it five stars.

But, I really do have to rebut the review of the above reader.

He's right - there's very little PHP 5 'specific' information on this book. This is a book for people with a solid grounding in PHP already. I can't stress that enough. If you don't know PHP inside and out, this book is not for you. If all you want to know is the differences between PHP 4 and 5, this book is not for you (to be honest, there's a web page on zend.com that tells you the differences in just a few pages).

If, however, you want to see how you can take your PHP development to a far higher tier than your peers, then this is the book for you. No other book treats PHP like a professional development language. Every other title insists on propagating appalling development practices, practices which are in part responsible for the majority of PHP on the web today looking like it was penned by a 13-year old in his bedroom.

Not this book. This is a book for professionals - either existing professionals seasoned in Java/JSP, C++ or some other 'traditional' programming language who is looking for how they can apply the 'best practice' techniques they've already learnt to PHP - or, for aspiring PHP professionals who have a solid grounding in and understanding of PHP 4 or 5 already.

Put it like this - I run a web agency. I am interviewing PHP people right now. Their code is truly appalling, universally, but I'm going to hire one of them. The one condition of their employment? That they read this book cover to cover before they start with us.

Hopefully this gives you a bit of an insight into what this book is about. If you're looking for a gentler introduction to PHP 5, take a look at Beginning PHP 5, also by Wrox (to which I also contributed). If you're ready to become a respected industry professional, take a look at this book.

For years I have relied on the reviews on Amazon to help me select the technical books I would purchase, this is only the 3rd time I've been moved to actually write a review and the first 5-star rating I've given. I bought this book because it seemed to have a lot more depth on oop in php5 than other titles available. What I got was that, plus a whole lot more.

If you are a garage php programmer, a hobbyist or a novice... if you don't make your living programming (or aspire to) - then this book is not for you.

On the other hand, if you are a professional, you will find that this book is written by professionals with you in mind. All of the excellent PHP5 related instruction and reference is discussed in the context of serious development methodologies and practices. It gives you insight as to how a serious development team can (and does) approach large-scale development projects in PHP. Any by the way, it ends forever any doubts you may have that PHP could or should be used for such projects.

Nice job guys! I only regret that I have but 5 stars to give.

This is obviously a book written by a collective of PHP4 programmers who have taken code that they've written and are familiar with (and which is sometimes outdated), and attempted to put a Object Oriented face on it in order to make a little money from this book.

Notice that if you're looking for a comprehensive PHP5 book, this is not it. The authors don't even mention the new MySQLi extension for PHP5 nor the SQLite database. It's obvious they come from and are still in the pre-PHP5 world. They also are slanted towards Smarty page templates and using Postgres for their examples. They give only a passing mention (one page, three sentences) to MySQL.

If you do buy this book, be prepared to go to www.wrox.com and the forums to find corrections to the code examples made by readers. Be prepared to re-write many of their examples.

All in all, this might be a generally useful book, but be advised that the grammatical errors, code mistakes, and parochial attitudes don't make it the best.

This book is great for experienced developers looking for some ideas in how you can use PHP to implement your application designs.

There are some obvious mistakes and bad design choices in the book, but most intelligent developers will spot these.

The last part of the book is an end-to-end review of a PHP5 life cycle, and it's pretty worthless if you're at all a postmodern developer.

This book is good for some programming ideas and for scratching the surface of how to design good PHP5 web applications.

Most of the people in who write php know that it's a very informal language in terms of quality. It's easy to get something done -- that's it's appeal -- but because of that it's also easy to write poorly written code.

This book teaches methods and concepts. When I picked it up I was expecting to learn about the features of php 5 but by the time I finished it I felt like I had gotten better as a developer. Alot of the general concepts of well written software are adapted here for PHP. So you learn not only what you can do with the language, but also how you should do correctly.

If you care about the quality of your code and write PHP get this book.

This book has taught me a few things, but probably not what the authors intended. A lot of the code is overly complicated (sometimes the code is just bad), and as such I've had to dumb down a number of their examples to better suit myself. There's only one part that I really found useful - the Generic Object class (it's very useful in MVC applications/frameworks).
This book assumes you'll be using PostgreSQL, which most PHP devs don't. There's no reason not to use MySQL. This isn't a huge deal if you have your own DB class already, but it will be a pain if you don't.
Something else that really bugged me was the inconsistency of the code, especially naming conventions. Having multiple authors supply code is fine, but it should appear as if it's all from one source. They should have picked a naming convention and stuck with it.
There are some good concepts in this book, but it's often buried beneath overly complicated code. What I really learned from this book is how to take the authors' code and make it better. I bought this book hoping to gain a better understanding of OOP and MVC - I would have been better off reading online tutorials (DevShed, OnLamp, Zend Developer Zone). If I had to buy this book again, I wouldn't, and I don't recommend that you buy it either.

I have been programming PHP for the past 5 years now, and have read many other books on programming PHP. This book tops the list. Most other books stick to the procedural programming, but this aspect of OOP and the examples were excellent.

I havent had a chance to test the actual code (I wanted to read completely through the book first and then go back with the examples). However, I am already using the new approaches in my current job and its making things much easier. I especially loved the chapters on project management and testing.

This book gets an all around 5 stars for being so thorough on so many aspects.

Great work!

I like the topics covered in this book. However, there are a number of grammatical errors throughout and the codes in the book are full of errors. If you're up for the challenge of surfing the books forum page at [...] to find code fixes, then this book is for you. But, if your not the adventurous type and like codes to work out of the box then this book isn't for you.

I agree that this book must have been rushed through development considering all the typographical errors, but I also agree that most of them are obvious and easy to overlook. I also agree that all the examples are written for PostgreSQL. I use both PostgreSQL and MySQL, so I don't have a problem with converting the code to use the new PHP mysqli functions. Other than quoting field names, there aren't many differences between PostgreSQL syntax and MySQL syntax. What this book does is start from chapter 1 showing you how to use Object Oriented Programming with PHP, and it does an excellent job of carefully covering each step so that you have a solid foundation to move to the next chapter. I love this book! Even with a mistake in the code on the errata page, it still rocks. Wrox books are the best!