computers and internet

I looked at a lot of PHP books and selected Luke & Laura's (in its first edition) because it had a pretty comprehensive but fast-paced introduction to the language and then went on to show several practical applications. Some other books just duplicate the php.net function reference, or walk you through the tiresome details of a single project, but this book gets you working in the language and then gives the key elements of several practical projects that are typical for PHP programmers: shopping cart, content management, mailing list, discussion forum, etc.

The authors wrote that they aimed their book at readers who have some HTML and some programming experience, but not necessarily any web-programming experience. That put me in their target market, and I found the book an excellent fit.

I looked over the second edition today, and it is a significant improvement. The code is now current with PHP 4.3, and while the authors try to use techniques that don't require the latest PHP version, the code is more compatible now with the latest version (e.g. register_globals is not assumed to be set On). Other tweaks in the code listings, e.g. "if (isset($myvar))" instead of "if ($myvar)", show the code has been polished. The typeface is improved too; there seems to be more text on each page but it's actually more legible.

I looked up a practical problem today, how to log-in and keep session-state variables for database-authenticated users. Lots of articles on the web, and even some PHP books, offer home-grown solutions that could be translations of 1997 Perl code, but Luke & Laura give a simple and elegant method (in chap. 20) that exploits PHP's latest built-in capabilities and is easy for me to extend. They extend it, too, in their example apps later in the book.

PHP is popular because it's a cheap, easy, and full-featured language for web programming. This book has the thorough and practical approach that will have you quickly building commercially useful PHP applications.

I have used various programming books in the past and this one is the best. It is easy to read and understand, but is advanced enough to allow the reader to develop some powerful online applications.

Unlike many other PHP books, this book doesn't waste time listing every single possible PHP command. Instead, the reader becomes immediately involved in tutorials which allow him/her to practice new concepts and figure some stuff out of his/her own.

The most vaulable part of the book is Section V. Here, the authors have developed projects which solve typical scenerios to which a programmer may be charged. They methodically establish the problem, develop a flow-chart-aided plan, and produce all of the code necessary to implement the solution. Projects include a user authentication system, a shopping cart, and a content management system.

Personally, I was hired to create a website with dynamically generated content stored on a database. Having no database experience and little programming experience, I found this book both accessible and advanced enough for my needs.

I bought this a few months back and I found it useful getting started with PHP and MySQL. The problem, though, is that it doesn't go far enough: the material on PDF doesn't actually show you how to write a report from a database or get anything installed, there's almost nothing on advanced MySQL, and just 10 pages on OO programming. I also found the code hard to get going and a bit buggy. The 2nd edition seems to not really have moved with the pace of the area and it left me unsatisfied. In the end, I went in search of another book.

Williams and Lane's new 2nd edition of "Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL" (O'Reilly, 2004) has done it for me. It weighs in at almost 800 pages, a few hundred more than its 1st edition, and it looks like an almost complete rewrite. It covers PDF reporting in depth, installation on Windows and Mac OS X, and has chapters towards the end on PEAR, advanced MySQL, and PHP55 OO features. By the time I bought it, I guess wasn't really a newbie, but I still think it is gentle enough if you're still getting the basics (the first 200 pages or so introduce PHP and MySQL). It's a pretty awesome book, and shows again why O'Reilly are a safe bet (though perhaps it's wise to wait for the 2nd editions, judging by the bugs in the 1st edition of this one).

I reckon both books are worth the money, but if you just want one, then O'Reilly's new book is better.