Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself PHP4 in 24 Hours (Teach Yourself -- 24 Hours)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is very clear and easy to follow. It does not have the depth of Professional PHP Programming which is still the best PHP reference so far. It also does not have any in depth practical examples. However, this book is excellent for beginners. Every concept is explained, nothing is assumed. This book also makes a good reference because it it well organized. I give it 5 stars because it is the clearest, easiest to follow and best written PHP book to date.

To summarize, if you want an easy to follow, easy to read book on PHP, buy this one. If you want an in depth reference with actual in depth programming examples, by Professional PHP Programming. If you want an easy well written introduction to using databases with PHP, buy PHP Essentials.

I'm still reading this book, but it has helped me out a lot already in the PHP arena. The book has great examples, quizzes and activities to make sure that you are getting the point of each hour (chapter). The only bad thing I can say is that the book does have some minor layout problems, but you can just over look those. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone wanting to start scripting in PHP. **Side note - the book covers Unix based installs of PHP4. If you want to install PHP4, MySQL and Apache on your Windows machine go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/phptriad/ and download their install program.

A former student recently sent me a message describing the work he was doing in web design using PHP. Not having any experience in the language but hearing good things about it prompted me to take an interest. In other cases, I have read programming books like this due to a pressing need to learn the language. However, this time I read a book just to see what the language was all about.
The language itself certainly holds promise in the area of the creation of dynamic web content. As far as the book, it also lived up to the promises. The features of the language were presented using clear, basic examples that were easy to follow. What was most impressive was that less time was spent on the routine features such as variables, data types, flow control, objects and such. The points of interest were the mechanisms whereby the state of the operation could be saved and the section on debugging. As one who has debugged many a JavaScript program with alert boxes and selectively commenting out code, the presence and concentration on the debugging features were considered well done.
I learned a great deal about the language from the book, even absent the usual pressure to learn a language in the titled 24 hours. PHP is a language that has a lot of potential, and the coverage in this book makes that and the language clear.

This is a fairly solid introduction to the language, though it might be tough going for a reader with no programming experience at all.

The organisation is good, and it walks you through all the basics you would require for straightforward bread and butter projects.

As others have noted, there are far too many typos, but an alert reader should pick most of them up easily enough.

In general, though, the book is better on the "how" than the "why". For example, in an early chapter is has a perfectly decent outline of PHP Dynamic Variables, but the inexperienced reader will find little guidance on why such a feature can be useful.

Overall, then, a good place to start for the inexperienced programmer, and for a small project it might serve well enough on its own. For anything more ambitious, you would need to move on to more meaty guidance on issues such as site architecture, security, data validation, error handling and session management strategies.

This book is typical of the Sams Teach Yourself in 24 Hours series. It does a good job of giving developers new to PHP enough familiarity with the syntax to be productive fairly quickly, including somewhat more advanced topics such as database integration and object orientation, which apparently is supported much better in PHP4 than in version 3.

In fact, one of the strong points of the book is to point out what's new and improved over PHP3. I was also able to use the provided file upload utility "out of the box", unlike the one in OReilly's just released CGI Programming with Perl, 2d edition. This in itself has convinced me to do a lot of my future web programming with PHP.

However, I have a couple of issues with the file upload utility. For one, I suspect it was in large measure influenced by "Core PHP Programming"; see pp 76-78 of that tome and compare it with pp 152-155 of "Teach Yourself PHP4". Plus I question the use of a hidden field for setting the maximum file size. After all, it's just going to get turned into a PHP variable anyway, so if you want to stop anyone from viewing source and seeing what you've set the maximum field size to, just set a variable or even constant right in the script.

Other similar questionable programming practices are recommended. For instance, the author dissuades the reader from using "break" and/or "continue" when constructing loops because they can be buggy. Hogwash! For instance, it is standard practice to use "break" to exit a loop if you were looping over values just to find one -- you "break" when you've found the desired value.

If you put these concerns aside, though, the book is good both for beginners, and for the more experienced who want an idea of what's new in PHP4.

  Great way to learn PHP. Probably not as basic as Julie Meloni's "PHP Fast & Easy Web Development," but it doesn't assume that you already know a lot.

There's no CD, which might bother some, but I believe you learn and retain the code better if you type it in yourself. If you've enjoyed other Sam's 24 hour/21 day books, then you'll probably like this one. I've read a few of them and this is my favorite so far.

Like PHP Fast & Easy, Teach Yourself PHP4 in 24 Hours is great for beginners. As far as which is better, it's really just a matter of taste. This one might be a little more to-the-point, whereas Julie's book might seem a little friendlier to absolute beginners; she holds your hand every step of the way.

If you're already progressing with PHP, or if you're already familiar with programming in general, you might want something a little more advanced.

For those just starting, this book (along with the online PHP manual at php.net, of course), should have you programming with PHP in no time.

I have little programming experience. I bought this in order to learn PHP from the ground up. However, as noted in some other reviews, there are a lot of typos even in the examples (in the form of misidentified variables, etc). If you have enough experience with programming, you probably see these things and rightfully blow right past them. But for newbies, you spend hours trying to figure out what-the-heck the author is doing. That was my experience with this book. Further, I was not able to find a listing of errata on the web site. Finally, some concepts are poorly explained or use jargon unfamiliar to beginners (such as the use of classes and objects). I spent many hours trying to figure out the information on object-oriented programming.

On the plus side, the book does have some good examples, it has assignments (unfortunately without any sample solutions), quizzes at the ends of chapters, and it has a review at the end of each chapter in a question/answer format.

I DO like this book for its design, concept, and structure. Unfortunately, the errors and occasional obscurity are significant flaws.

I would actually give this book 4.5 stars if I could--content was excellent, but lack of attention to detail in some of the examples brought it down a bit. Also, the author points out some shortcuts in the book (like using the short tag extension syntax <?=$var?> instead of the more verbose <? print $var; ?>,) but never seems to use them in the book, thus not getting new PHP'ers into the habit of using them--perhaps for readability's sake. Having gotten out of the way with what's wrong with this book, here is what's right:

-Organized, easy to follow

-Lessons are task-oriented, and it's easy to find small code snippets (albeit some of them contain incorrect syntax--that's were experience coding in a different language can be a mitigating factor.)

-Serviceable as a lightweight code snippet reference once you've finished the lessons.

This is one of the better books out there for newbie PHP'ers out of the 4 or 5 that I've looked at.

PLUSES

The book is very well organized in 24 chapters that are supposed to take roughly one hour each to cover. While the earlier chapters take no more than 20 minutes or so, the later ones may take a little more than one hour if you actually intend to "digest" their contents. On average, I guess it takes you about an hour per chapter.

The coverage of PHP also seems to be quite good (although I am not an advanced programmer and therefore cannot not be totally sure about that). I can't think of anything I might one day like to do with PHP that I didn't find somewhere in the book. True enough, locating this information is not always very easy, but with a little effort you'll end up finding it.

Finally, the layout is not only appealing but also makes the book easy to use.

MINUSES

The blurb on the back cover is a bit too ambitious: it promises you'll "learn how to ... setup a secure PHP environment ... create dynamic charts and graphics on your web pages ... create dynamic web applications using PHP." Well, I guess you might if you read the book four or five times and spent lots of time studying each chapter. Otherwise, I don't think you'll be going quite so far.

While the author writes clearly enough, he sometimes uses a string of technical terms that you're supposed to have memorized. Problem is, sometimes you don't remember them all, and if the context doesn't help, you get lost. Take this sentence as an example: "When you pass arguments to functions they are stored as copies in parameter variables." I had to go back to several different pages to remind myself what the difference between "parameters" and "arguments" was, and also what the heck "parameter variables" was supposed to mean. I think sometimes the author assumes that you'll remember every single new term that is introduced, and he'll be using them to introduce yet another new term in a couple of pages. For programmers with some previous experience that may be okay, but not for novices like me.

Some of the explanations of important new concepts are just barely mentioned in the text and then actually introduced in an example. However, most of the examples consist of a chunk of code without any mention as to what this code will output to the browser or file or whatever, so you just have to guess what will come out as a result. Now, if you're still trying to understand what a particular chunk of code will do, it would help to see what it would result in. More screenshots of code output to a browser, for example, would have helped a lot.

There are also quite a few misprints: double closing parentheses where there should only be one, misplaced line numbers in the middle of the code, etc. Misprints in text are not so serious, because you understand the "code" (i.e. the language) well enough that you can make sense out of it. But misprints in the PHP code that you're trying to learn can be very confusing. All of a sudden you find this "10:" in the middle of a line of code, and by the time you've figured out that it's the number of the next line that has somehow wound up in the middle of the previous line, you've wasted ten minutes of your time.

This is the best computer book I have. It may be that PHP is easier than Perl (yes), but I've never gotten away with only having one book on any Web topic. This book is so good that I went from "Hello World" to a live, MySQL-driven, online page editor in just 4 hours.

The book is well laid out, with good typography, charts, and images. The chapters are organized very well, either for front-to-back reading, or salad-bar style. I skipped around the book for my first couple hours and then just used the Index to find everything else. Anything I couldn't find in the Index I found with the Table of Contents.

I'm not a "Dummy" but I also wasn't born wearing a propellor-hat. I already knew Perl and SQL before I started PHP, which helped me a lot. I don't know how it would be for a programming beginner. (If you're a beginner, skip Perl and go with PHP.)

If you're using PHP4, don't get another book. Get this book.