Core PHP Programming: Using PHP to Build Dynamic Web Sites (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

by Leon Atkinson (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Revised for PHP version 4, the new edition of Core PHP Programming is a comprehensive tutorial and reference to one of today's hottest scripting languages. Part tutorial and part reference, this book will get beginners started with PHP, as well as provide a convenient desktop resource for more experienced PHP developers.

Early sections show what PHP is and how it works, with basic data types, flow control, and other topics you'll need to get started. But the heart of the book is a full reference to PHP 4 functions. Organized by topic, this text provides over 400 pages of reference to several hundred PHP calls, along with a description of what they do. Clearly organized and presented, this book will help you find what you need quickly (instead of relying on PHP's often cumbersome online help). In particular, readers will appreciate the coverage of database functions, including the separate calls for MySQL, ODBC, and Oracle. You'll also see what PHP can do with XML.

The last part of the book reverts to tutorial mode, first with a section on algorithms that discusses ways to sort and search PHP arrays. Final sections look at some strategies you can use to integrate PHP into the software design process, in which the strategies of combining HTML content with dynamic PHP scripts are shown. There is also useful advice for increasing performance with PHP. (It would seem that upgrading to PHP 4 is a must, because the new version offers a real performance boost.)

PHP is clearly a popular choice for Web applications today. If you buy just one book on PHP, consider Core PHP Programming. It offers an approachable tutorial that will put basic PHP script development into the hands of beginners, and provides a useful reference for everyday development once you've gotten a handle on how to use it. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered:

• History and introduction to PHP
• Installing PHP on Apache/Unix and IIS/NT
• PHP script basics
• PHP language tutorial (including data types, variables, and operators)
• Flow control statements
• PHP functions (arguments, recursion, and dynamic function calls)
• Single and multidimensional arrays
• PHP classes
• Creating Web pages in PHP
• Environment variables
• File uploads and file I/O
• PHP session management
• PHP function reference
• I/O functions (including files and compressed files, session handling, network I/O, and FTP)
• Data functions (including arrays, hashing, strings, and regular expressions)
• Mathematical functions
• Date and time functions
• Image functions
• Database functions (including support for MySQL, ODBC, Oracle, and Postgres)
• Miscellaneous functions (including XML functions)
• Algorithms for sorting and searching in PHP
• Parsing and tokenizing strings
• Database programming how-to
• Authenticating
• Sending e-mail
• Software engineering basics with PHP
• Integrating PHP and HTML
• Using CVS for version control
• Optimization hints

From Library Journal
The next hot environment is going to be PHP, a server-side, cross-platform, HTML-embedded scripting language that is open source (free) and completely Y2K compliant. PHP code is embedded within HTML, and the files are saved with either .phtml or .php3 extensions. For readers with a programming background, this solid guide has four sections: a basic introduction to the programming environment, a PHP function reference, algorithms, and software engineering for integrating PHP with HTML and the cgi for interactive programming and database querying. For larger computer collections.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 769 pages
• Publisher: Pearson Education; 2 edition (August 3, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0130893986
• ISBN-13: 978-0130893987
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (121 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,376,165 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

• This item is part of The Core Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A decent reference, though not as useful as the free manual, August 11, 2000

By A Customer

This book does a solid job of listing the basic functions and descriptions and is aimed more at the beginner, so I would recommend it to someone who is just starting out with PhP and/or who may not want to be online all the time to get reference help. Experienced PhP programmers probably won't find enough in this book to warrant it's cost, but the beginner should definitely consider buying it.

This book is a nice reference but doesn't really have much beyond what you can find online. (which you can also download for free). In fact I find the online manual more helpful because of the annotations which make it a work in progress. It's a philosophical issue - do you like having a real book in your hands to browse through or do you not mind using a web browser?

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent and comprehensive guide to PHP, September 15, 2000

By	Steve Benner "Stonegnome" (Lancaster, UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a wonderful book! I've had this nagging background need to learn PHP for some time and have been putting it off as one of those extra little tasks I could do without. After reading just a little of this book I couldn't wait to get started!

Leon Atkinson aims his book at both beginner and advanced users and his writing style manages to score a direct hit! The basics are covered in sufficient detail to allow the intelligent beginner to follow along and learn useful stuff pretty quickly. This is achieved without talking down to advanced users, or bogging them down in masses of simple things. The organisation and layout of the book is good enough to allow most readers to jump straight into the sections that interest them most, so if you just want to use this book for reference, rather than have it act as a tutor, you can. Lots of references to more elementary programming texts are provided for anyone who does find themself struggling with the concepts, but I can't really imagine anyone needing them.

Coverage is very comprehensive too, so you never find yourself left in the lurch just as things are about to get really interesting, as I've had happen in many books aimed at beginners. So far, this book has provided good solid instruction of every PHP task I've needed or fancied (although a better index wouldn't go amiss!) and has frequently provided me with a coded solution all ready to plug in and use! I can see that this volume will have a place alongside my computer for some time!

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not as bad as many think - for beginners, March 6, 2000

By	John Hsu (Boston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Core PHP Programming (Paperback)

This book was the first of five I now own on the topic, and while many of the criticisms written previously here are accurate (especially the irritating example code which doesn't show you the resulting output), I still find myself pulling this one off the shelf because of some of its virtues :

1) It's a decent introduction to PHP, because it won't overwhelm the first-time web programmer, and pretty much assumes you don't know much of anything

2) Despite the amazingly disorgranized approach to the topic, certain sections are quite useful : regular expressions, various sorting methods, generating graphics on the fly, and basic approaches to integrating HTML & PHP are well covered.

3) Even though it's an apparent ploy to boost the page count of a book of somewhat shallow content depth, the fact that the type is larger than average with huge bold headlines for each function really helps if you're just flipping through looking for something specific.

4) The cover is actually attractive, unlike the usual monstrosity of a cover of Professional PHP Programming (why does WROX think we acutally want the faces of the authors staring up at you all the time ? ). OF course, Professional PHP Programming is far and away the best book on this topic if you have any programming experience.