Book Review: Professional Php, 1st Edition
Summary: excellent learning examples, interesting apps.
Boy, my reviews of Wrox books probably seem a little boring, since there is so little fault to find with them. The Wrox programming books are really the best books on the market, and it's interesting that the Oreilly books haven't yet published a decent book on php or xml stuff. I liked the way this PHP book explained the various setup options and the amount of space discussing mysql (which is a major reason why people are using php anyway).
What distinguishes this book from the rest are the examples. The tutorial part of the book works with two simple projects, an online job app and an address book, which were easy enough to follow. Actually, I found this book to be a useful intro to cgi script writing in addition to php.
Also interesting were 4 case studies about ways to use php. Example: did you know that with the qt libraries, php can manipulate images (such as zooming, and overwriting images with text)? That is amazing! A chapter on phorum explains how a discussion software uses php, and another one explains the use of a shopping cart (I tend to agree with the other reader who thinks that this is not necessarily the best example to use). The book also describes other things like using php for file management and storage, email configuration, and network connections. Some other topics covered in depth include: xml, security and database integration.
The appendix has many things. First, obviously, it has an alphabetical list of all the php functions. It also has a helpful appendix on http headers and another on browser support of html tags. This last thing is only somewhat handy to have, because web developers reading this book are past the point of needing browser support info re legacy html tags. Instead developers should be worrying about xml and xslt. Some technical books increase the size of their book by stuffing a lot of code throughout it. Wrox seems to like to increase the size by including large and somewhat irrelevant appendices.
This book made me realize many new potential ways in which php could be used. That is the most valuable thing about the book. I have not tried very much of the code, so I can't comment on whether it all works. But (to summarize) it will really broaden your horizons of what php is capable of.
