Sams Teach Yourself PHP4 in 24 Hours (Teach Yourself -- 24 Hours) 1st Edition

by Matt Zandstra (Author)

28 ratings

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Consisting of 24 one-hour lessons, Sams Teach Yourself PHP4 in 24 Hours is divided into five sections that guide you through the language from the basics to the advanced functions. The first section of the book teaches the fundamentals of PHP. Building upon what has been taught in the first section, sections two through four show you how to apply that knowledge in order to interact with the user by creating and managing forms, cookies and authentication. It also teaches how to access databases and how to integrate system components, e-mail, LDAP, network sockets and much more. The final section of the book covers advanced functionality including how to debug and optimize scripts, maintain script security, and extend PHP with API.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Sams; 1st edition (June 23, 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0672318040
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0672318047
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.81 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.5 x 1 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #7,611,757 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #9,936 in Web Design (Books)
- #16,033 in Computer Programming Languages
- #29,846 in Programming Languages (Books)

Customer Reviews:
28 ratings

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Moi-même

Good, but could be better

Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2001

Verified Purchase

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.

3 people found this helpful

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Ravi H. Radheshwar

Great starting point

Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2001

Verified Purchase

This book is a great place to start if you want to learn & use PHP. It gives you all the basics, and lots of examples to go with them.
However, I would highly recommend also getting "PHP and MySQL Web Development" (also from the Sam's line of books)...this one covers some more complicated issues, and definitely was of more use to me to deal with real-life PHP web development.
Keep in mind, however, that the "PHP and MySQL..." book assumes that the reader knows some PHP basics, which is where "...PHP4 in 24 Hours" comes in.

2 people found this helpful

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Hi - It's Me

Doesn't care about customers of older editions

Reviewed in the United States on September 26, 2004

Verified Purchase

I bought this book when it was still current. I recently emailed the author trying to get the code for this edition since I misplaced the original code download, he refused to give me the code, trying to get me to buy the newest edition. Sams and this author have no respect for customers of an edition after a newer edition comes out. I made sure the next PHP book I bought was NOT a Sams book or from this author.

Helpful

MK

A very good PHP book, especially for beginners

Reviewed in the United States on September 11, 2002

This book will really get you started if you're beginning with PHP. It's not one of those complicated books that assumes you have a bunch of random prerequisites covered before you start. Rather, it is a book where you can really learn from the ground up--and to a rather proficient level, I must say.
I read through probably 75% of the book and I often use it for reference or when I'm looking up how to do something. It does a good job explaining language building blocks, including variables, dynamic variables, flow control, functions, string manipulation basics, regular expressions and so forth. It actually does a good job explaining how to connect and access what you need from a MySQL database as well.
Basically this book will give you a good functional and pragmatic understanding of PHP and its potential applications. It is not comprehensive, however, as I have often found myself looking elsewhere (specifically online) for guidance. But since PHP is open source, you really don't need a book 100% for it, and you'll find just about everything you need online. It is nice, however, to have a book to read from, especially if you're a beginner. If you're new to PHP and you really want to get started with PHP web development I would most certainly recommend this book.

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Sams Teach Yourself PHP4 in 24 Hours (Teach Yourself -- 24 Hours) 1st Edition

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Editorial Reviews

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Matt Zandstra

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