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Professional PHP4 XML
Introduction
Over the years, XML has not only become a useful way to represent and transmit data in an application independent way, it has also become an integral part of virtually every component within an enterprise application and developer tools that we use everyday. Until two years ago, PHP has often been neglected when it came to extending the core PHP libraries to include any XML capabilities. Even further, there has often been a lack of written resources to guide PHP developers to learning these technologies as it pertains specially to the PHP platform.
Over time, however, many committed open-source programmers have developed extensions for PHP to include SAX, DOM, XPATH and XSLT support. Even further, many PEAR contributors and Sourceforge projects have included greater XML support for WDDX, XML-RPC, SOAP, Apache Xindice and many other XML-based technologies and applications. As new APIs were released, PHP really started to become a powerful platform to develop applications that were capable of solving many enterprise business problems. These improvements provided PHP with the power and functionality needed to compete with platforms like Java, .NET and Perl to create the open-source scripting language of choice, providing an easy-to-use and a powerful set of capabilities to developers all across the world.
The ScoopTrue to its title, Professional PHP4 XML is a rich guide and resource to using XML technologies within the PHP platform for intermediate to expert developers (spanning 945 pages). Although the book is intended for seasoned programmers looking to enrich their XML-related skills, the book does in fact include a primer on the core syntax and capabilities of the PHP language and fundamentals of XML to ensure the reader is able to understand and appreciate the book's content. Also, given the clear and concise writing style and the thoroughness of the book's content, novice programmers will be able learn a great deal and follow along naturally.
Unlike many books that briefly discuss a given technology and provide simple, but working examples, Professional PHP4 XML goes beyond these base requirements by supplementing the concepts and code examples throughout the book with a wealth of fascinating and useful information. The book accomplishes this by engaging the reader with innovative solutions to common, reoccurring problems as well as not so common problems that you'll find in the real world. In addition, each chapter provides a great deal of insight into:
- The overall architecture of the technology/standard itself,
- Clear design goals when using that particular technology
- Best practices to help the reader avoid common pitfalls, and
- Some heads up information on future changes in the XML libraries as best as can be predicted by the authors.
Each chapter also explores the various consequences to using a particular technology within an organization and how XML aids developers in simplifying the overall design and maintainability of enterprise applications. In a nutshell, this book enlightens the reader to improve their design techniques and current programming models rather than looking at trivial examples and function definitions that many sites on the web already provide.
The material itself is very well organized and flows in a logical progression that you'd naturally expect. The XML Fundamentals chapter provides the reader with the basic knowledge of data representation, markup languages and an extensive coverage of the syntax, rules and terminology of the XML 1.0 specification. It also provides a primer on topics such as DTDs, XML schema and namespaces.
The next chapter is a very rich catalog of all the XML vocabularies and standards developed prior to the book's publication. It provides an introductory coverage of markup languages like WML, SVG and RDF and parsing and transformation technologies like SAX, DOM and XSLT. Essentially, almost all derivatives are covered to provide the reader with 'the big picture,' which is commonly missed from many books.
The book continues with very detailed discussions on the core XML technologies: SAX, DOM, XPath and XSLT. It is designed to provide the reader with the theoretical concepts as well as the practical coding techniques and examples spanning just over 260 pages (not including the appendices at the back of the book). Thus, readers are not required to purchase a book on the general XML technologies or a book specifically pertaining to DOM or XSLT as Professional PHP4 XML covers each of the topics in very lengthy detail. Essentially, this book can pretty much stand alone by itself, but if you want a nice professional taster to PHP, then this book's parent: Professional PHP4 Programming is a good bet. You may also want to read this book's sibling: Professional PHP4 Multimedia Programming, which is replete with full case studies using PHPs multimedia extension libraries to build dynamic PHP front ends.
The last chapters of the book also feature detailed discussions on 'Syndicated Content' with a practical bent, inside insight on 'XML storage' and a case study to develop a calendar server using 'XML-RPC'. Another highlight of the book is the comprehensive reference section, including: PHP4 XML Language reference, Installation reference, SAX, DOM, XSLT and Xpath references and a primer on Object-Oriented programming with PHP.
What's To Consider?Although the review has been fairly positive up to this point, there are some minor problems with the book. First, some chapters were written better than others, as is the same with all multi-author books. Since Wrox strives to deliver up-to-date books on bleeding-edge technologies, it only makes sense that several authors must collaborate to deliver such a comprehensive book (also considering no single individual is an 'expert' at all these technologies). However, WROX has ensured that there is a consistent flow between the chapters to align each of them with the overall vision for the book. This is an evolving trend with new Wrox titles as we can see this from their new releases.
The last negative aspect of the book, although at no real fault to the authors or the publisher, is the chapter on SVG graphics. Although fairly good, this chapter will probably not be useful for many of the readers. Even now, there has not been a wide demand for the use of SVG graphics and many older browsers cannot even support them. With time, however, this chapter might prove to be more useful in the future.
SummaryOverall, whether you are a novice or highly skilled PHP programmer, Professional PHP4 XML will provide you with the very best in-depth and concise guide to using XML and related technologies within the PHP language. Perhaps you think you know XML very well, even within the context of PHP, but this book might surely surprise you with information that could only be provided by the experience gained through these XML-pioneering authors. I must say that Wrox and the authoring staff have done a wonderful job delivering such a great book and that I would sincerely recommend this book to any aspiring to advanced PHP developer.
You can read a sample chapter from the book online, and you can purchase Professional PHP4 XML from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
How can it be best selling if it just came out?
Regards, Guspaz.
One of my sourceforge projects recently joined forces with some others, and I had the fortune of meeting some developers who were keen on php+xml+xslt. I thank the gods for this. I took me only a couple of hours to expand my php and xml knowledge to include xslt. I also learned that Sablotron is not the name of a Transformer.
Anyway for those interested in PHP and really separating the display layer from the logic layer, using XML and XSLT is handy, to say the least.
"More organs means more human." - Zim
Yes i'm going to write the next xml book, XML in COBAL.
sorry for the lame joke.. just that i see XML everywhere nowadays.
- tristan
This sounds promissing!
...
A book with more than just "Hello World" examples!
There must be a couple "professional" examples with 945 pages! There is only so much BS you can write about PHP and XML
*Driving to book store to see if they have a copy*
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Only if you define "enterprise" as "web". XML is making inroads in some enterprise applications, but there are still vast swaths of that territory where XML remains irrelevant.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
if I am using JSP for web page generation, servlets as my logic and any scripting and customizing is being used by either Perl or Python, then what would make me use PHP? This is not a troll (well it is, but for information) If PHP offers somethign in addition or instead of any component I use now then I would definitely take a look at it. I just want to avoid having yet another set of code and components that I have to worry about compatability. What does PHP do that JSP does not? Thanks
Eg take example config file:The code to change the IP is:Here is an example guestbook and its source.
I wrote it for a client but it never got used, hence I made it public and freely available. I haven't had a chance to get on the PHP developers list and try and get it incorporated into the standard distro, but if enough people try it, like it, and email me... then I am prepared to put some effort into getting it put in place.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Why not a Cobol and XML book?
Lots of old systems are still using cobol and there's probably a demand to link them to newer systems that already do use xml.
(Confession: I don't and never have used cobol)
Why do we need XML? Isn't HTML good enough and an open standard, so why XML?
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Does anybody know when/what XML support will be integrated into the default PHP package?
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
That's the point of XML.
Best Slashdot Co
Sorry, without it being properly parsed, I can't really see what you are trying to get across. I would suggest the book "XML for Dummies" it worked for me.
Buy the book on amazon
...and it has been a fantastic read. These guys sure do manage to keep up with the times huh!
This book was a genuinely great buy - reference for life and helped make design choices for me at work.
Why are all books best selling?
It always makes me think that the review was written by one of the publisher's PR hacks.
According to Amazon, the 5 top selling PHP books are:
It sounds like a good book, so might become a best seller given time, but let's give it time.
I bought the previous version, and was underwhelmed. There was a lot of fluff and whitespace; large chunks of pages devoted to offsetting images of webpages with nothing much in them.
One example: their shopping cart example was borderline trivial, and the majority of the code was formatting - which made it damn near impossible to follow the code for all the FONT and other HTML tags. I expect a book written for 'professionals' to give me tips-from-the-battlefield, NOT handwaving exercises.
If someone knew PHP (a seemingly fair assumption, given the title of this book), it seems like they'd be far better off looking for examples on the Net., or for another book.
While its target audience is different, I found O'Reilly's 'Programming PHP' to be excellent and I use it 20x more than the WROX book.
While I would be *slightly* more tactful, I have fund it absurd that PHP supports at least basic OO, yet still uses absurdly long function names. This is what OO in C looks like, and there's a reason that's not a very popular approach to programming.
I know it's made it hard for me to have much enthusiasm about PHP. As for an alternative, http://www.modruby.net
Oh yeah, I remember:
Pussies Hate Perl.
Third-Generation Time-phase Implementation Tools for Scalable Enterprise Solution-based Efficiency Leveraging Logistics.
These days, about half of all things XML are buzz, and half of the remaining half is just "This is XML. It is cool. You are besmitten with coolness" drudgery.
I, for one, still don't know exactly what is XML and why it is so cool. I know it's some sort of data description language, but now why should it be better than the zillions of other data formats we've been using for the past decades ? That's what I don't grok. Does anybody have some down-to-earth explanation that will tell me _why_ I should read this book and _why_ it matters at all ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
In the past, I have been somewhat disappointed with the Wrox series of books. There is another book on the subject of PHP/XML titled simply "XML and PHP" published by New Riders. I have been very impressed with the quality of the content of all their other PHP-themed books and was wondering: Has anyone read/used this book and liked/disliked it?
i swear my userid used to be lower.
As someone who has written a fair amount of php that accessed XML documents, this book is nice change from trying to figure out parsers, SOAP, XMLRPC, ect. from web based resources. I am currently working on a schedular for XMLRPC requests and I have only had the book for two days, and it has already paid for itself in saved time. This is much better than the proffession php book I got from them. I also turns out that I went to school with one of the authors at UNC chapel hill, small world
There are at least a couple of others; I have just started reading "XML and PHP" by Vaswani (New Riders, 2002) and it seems pretty good.
There's also "XML Processing with Perl, Python and PHP" which I haven't looked at.
Oh! Yes...googly goog, this book covers the new DOM extension....and mind you the book came out in June!!!
We at slashdot are mouthless jigaboos
sounds to me like someone is trying to convince themselves that Perl is ok. Or perhaps Perl is less the issue and what is more the issue is that said person is a mindless zealot who wishes to cleanse the world of all non-pure thoughts (anything not Perl in this case). I believe in applying logic and reason, leading me to use the best tool. However if something has a cult following I admit it becomes suspect simply because fads (in the past) are the opiates of the stupid and lifeless.
Heh another ill-informed idiot.
"Derp de derp."