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Professional PHP4
PHP is an open source server-side HTML-embedded web scripting language for creating dynamic web pages. Outside of it being browser-independent, PHP offers a simple and universal cross-platform solution for e-commerce, complex web, and database-driven applications. Professional PHP4 will show you exactly how to create state-of-the-art web applications that scale well, utilize databases optimally, and connect to a backend network using a multi-tiered approach.
Almost an year since its release, this book has stood the test of time, and proved to be what it promised -- an up-to-date, advanced book on PHP -- a category in which there are very few worthwhile entries to date.
It provides a solid, fast-paced drill on the rudimentaries of PHP (although the fast-paced installation instructions come in the form of classic compendia -- worth 100 pages) for seasoned programmers, before it plunges head straight into the more advanced areas of the language. Each chapter reads a bit like a tutorial on a particular area of advanced PHP development.
If you are a competent programmer in just about any other language or have grappled with HTML before, then this book will teach you PHP from scratch . It will also introduce you to many of the more advanced areas of PHP programming, and is a treasure trove for information on diverse tasks possible with the language.
Notable topics include:
- Object Oriented Programming
- Sessions and Cookies
- Coding an FTP Client
- Sending and Receiving Email and News
- Networking and TCP/IP
- Non-Web Programming (including GTK)
- PHP and XML
- PHP and MySQL/PostgreSQL/ODBC
- Security
- Multi-tier development
- Optimisation
The code for the examples presented in the book is available for download, from the publisher's web site.
Although this book is reasonably complete, it lacks sufficient depth for experienced PHP developers who want to wade into the depths of specific PHP related tasks. Having said that, the publisher has provided information (of course at a separate cost) on specific areas with their second level PHP titles -- Professional PHP4 XML , Beginning PHP4 Multimedia Programming , Beginning PHP4 Databases and Professional PHP Web Services .
Suffice to say that the book has packed together a lot of diverse information (in 975 pages).
Related Links You can purchase Professional PHP4 from bn.com. (You may also be interested in the Slashdot review of Professional PHP XML of a few months ago.) Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
There is a paper on the ZEND engine 2.0 (which will power PHP5)
PDF: http://www.zend.com/engine2/ZendEngine-2.0.pdf
I would put the google HTML version of it, but it seems to be buggered.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again... the PHP website should be enough for anyone with basic programming skills. It's simple, clearly explained, and there's many examples and fixes posted by people. The only thing that would be helpful would be a PHP Cookbook that's as good as the Perl one.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
yea that why Yahoo is moving to PHP and not Java hmmm and here is slashdot articke about Yahoo moving to PHP
i have worked with both and i PERSONALY prefer PHP, I haven't faced a problem in php that I couldn't have solved....
Who controls the information, controls the world...
I was going to pick up this book, based on the recommondation of friends (programmers) and online reviews, but when I thumbed through it in the bookstore, it just seemed...weak. Thin.
This is PROFESSIONAL PHP programming, not BEGINNING PHP. Why even have the 100 or so odd pages on installation? This book is not targetted at newbies, it is for the serious developer. OK -- you're a J2EE dude who want to check it out; doesn't have PHP installed. Lots of references on the Web, and if you can't find them...you're not a Web developer.
While the book probably would be helpful as a reference in some cases, I was just disappointed in it. The cookie/session section was a joke (and this is new in v4, so should be fairly rigorous).
I didn't buy the book. And I like having references around. I have 7-8 open on my desk right now, from Perl through DHTML to PHP. Oh well, as people have noted, v5 is coming, so I guess we shouldn't get our packets in a bunch...
Thanks for the link. Now I can say, with confidence (from the article):
Yahoo has decided to switch from a proprietary system written in C/C++ to PHP for their backend scripting
Backend scripting != PHP pages on yahoo. This article wasn't read very well by slashdotters. They aren't converting yahoo over to PHP, they are using it for scripting.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Without the equivalent of Perl's excellent DBI/DBD
Like ADODB?
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
You could write the serial control mechanism in perl (or C, or whatever), then use system() (or related) calls from php to poke it / read the output. Not elegant perhaps, but... The other option, since reading and writing to serial ports isn't exactly rocket science or a new thing, would be to grab some C source to do said, and wrap it into a PHP extension (which seems like a semi-easy process from what little I looked at it, if it were truly difficult there wouldn't be bazillions of php extensions). Honestly though, if you start doing hardware access to vital resources from php PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD make the server machine accessible only on the local lan. In other words, you might want JoeBob the store manager in the back office to be able to have a real-time web interface to moniter the sales line, but you wouldn't want to expose that interface to Dieter the 13 year old German 1337 h4X0r. ;-)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Everyone that flames PHP needs to go sit in the corner and remember not to break their magic bubble of personal space. First the slashdot article is about the book not the language, second use whatever works for your needs. If PHP works for you and like it thats wonderful. If not use something else, there's a lot of other options.
In exchange for direct functions to send HTTP headers and cookies, you basically give up the ability to "control" the host computer.
:-)
PHP is not a be-all language, and it'd turn ugly quickly if they tried to force it to be one.
Bear in mind I am meaning access to functions on the server, not on the PC. You may well understand that but these days it can be iffy as to what people mean by host. PHP has a lot of good control functions and a lot of POS apps are run in the browser, hence my example. I feel PHP is rather well suited for that. A lot of people say it is a "perl replacement" to them I offer that if Perl can not do what you need, maybe a new programmer will help more than a new language
You can write your own extension (in C for instance) to interface with the hardware - and provide the PHP functions you want.
See here for details...
BlackNova Traders
The 'id=foo&name=bar' translating to $id and $name defined is per the 'register globals' setting, which is now off by default in new installations. You'd need to identify where things are coming from:
$_GET['id'];
More typing, but generally safer, as it does force you to think about where things are coming from.
creation science book
Ah, hopefully grasshopper you will learn in time that embedding code inside your HTML is a really bad idea. Sadly PHP (and JSP and ASP and a whole host of other languages) encourages this behaviour.
What you really want is a good templating system.
(Yes, I know PHP can do templating systems, thank you).
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
With permissions set in /dev, you can't access and control system devices such as serial ports? Are you running PHP in safe mode? If so, you'll probably have to disable that.
/dev entries. Unless of course you're using PHP on Windows, then I'm sorry, but you bear the burden of a lower OSform.
I've had only a little experience using PHP to talk directly to devices, but it's been successful experience. I should think you'd be able to pop open the cash drawer and stuff like that on the server with PHP using filesystem functions on
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
One thing that stirkes about PHP is it's position in the market. It simply ownz all other SSI technologies out there. From ASP over JSP to Cold Fusion, PHP is one of the outstanding successes of OSS.
Yet all these SSI technologies have in common that they still don't manage to really split Design from content. I was all in for PHP as my way of doing SSI stuff until I ran into TAL. It's the second (next to DTML) SSI Language that comes with Zope and has been reimplemented in Perl (PETAL). The essential difference to other SSI solutions like the #1 PHP is that all SSI-relevant tags only come as parameters to standard HTML tags and thus absolutly don't interfere with WYSIWYG HTML tools or other stuff that belongs to markup. You even can get good editors to switch of the non-html tal parameters to do your markup uninterfered. Once on the server content of tal-parametered markup (tal-speak: "mockup") get's replaced with the dynamic content. The point is: Either way you have documents that can be previewed in browsers, edited and formated without the source code for serverside dynamics being touched - or vice versa.
A simple trick to establish true separation of content and code.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I can weigh in on that a little, having first learned and worked with ASP for 2 years before I got in to PHP, and having now been active in ASP and PHP both for that past two years.
ASP vs PHP there is so completely no comparison. There is only one single thing that ASP does that is easier than in PHP, and that is application-scoped variables with out a database. I've written my own PHP classes to facilitate this, and although they may not be as efficient as ASP's memory resident access, they are just as useful.
The hugely wide variety of functions PHP provides make programming a delight where you work more on your programming concepts and code flow than on authoring code. There are simply hundreds of functions available in PHP that I use on almost every page, that would require custom-written functions (that thus run as script, at lower performance than the precompiled PHP functions) that are simply not available in ASP. Try to do a join() or split() in ASP. Yes, it's doable, but with quite a lot of legwork. How about regular expressions? Searching, replacing, replacing with code execution, and more? Not gonna happen in ASP, nope.
Then there are SIMPLE things that are HTTP standards that are simply lacking in ASP. For example, uploading a file. Gotta buy a plugin in ASP to do that. Or uploading creating an array of elements on a form. If you want to have an unknown number of entries in a form, in PHP, you can name the input fields, "field[0]","field[1]","field[2]" and they come in as an array. Or you can even name them "field[]","field[]","field[]", and they will come in as an automatically indexed array. Useful when you want to do things like add rows of input to a table with javascript, and have a script that easily handles the collection. Try to upload an array in ASP, and you have to write code that breaks down the field names to your liking.
There are so many functions that I take for granted in PHP that I now have my own library of PHP functions rewritten in ASP so that when I am authoring in ASP, I'm not as limited by the language. Just try to do an md5 in ASP, or any other cryptographic operation though, I dare you.
Ok, sorry, rant over, been working on an ASP for the past month solid, and I think I'm going through PHP withdrawl.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
performance wise, i think perl and php are on the same level
... and let me tell you - its major pain.
i started out with php and then slowly moved to perl. i still have a lot of apps in php that i have to manintain once in a while
php is really easy to learn and implement, but it lacks infracstructure. on the other hand, in perl you get away with a lot more things and its true that if you are not careful perl will get obfuscated and unmaintainable very fast.
beauty of perl comes in when you put effort into developing strong infrastructure and stick to it. always use strict, -wt (warnings and taint mode). organize your code into neat modules (CGI::Application) and use a templating system (HTML::Template is very simple and wont let you clutter html with code). note that php doesnt have any of this features as readily available as in perl through CPAN modules
when it comes to documentation, it might be true that php has good resources online, but perl has a lot larger comunity (check out perlmonks.org) i got replies on my questions within 30 minutes of posting!
in short... perl has superior architecture to php, however php has better corporate support and better learning curve
I won't get into PHP-vs-Perl, as I think the two complement eachother nicely (if you realy know how to use mod_perl and PHP, you can do some amazing things with the Web which are not idealy suited to either one).
However, you are incorrect on some points:
Outstanding database support. PHP supports virtually every DB under the sun (although Berkeley DB is missing, oddly enough.) Perl seems limited to MySQL and PostgreSQL, and its really a kludge for the later. I've heard that this will be fixed in upcoming versions of Perl though.
Since version 4 (over 10 years ago) Perl has had access to Sybase and Oracle. Newer additions (from the past 5 years or so) include MySQL, PostgreSQL, CSV flat-file DBs, DB2, *DBM, and an ODBC interface layer for just about any database.
The DBI module provides one uniform interface to all of these.
Speed. PHP is one of the fastest languages I've ever used. While it won't be replacing assembly or C, its definitely faster than Perl in most cases.
This depends wildly on what you're doing. PHP is pretty slow when it comes to handling deep, and complex data-structures, but quite fast when it comes to handling simple data like strings. Perl maintains a balance between these two, and an elegant interface to C and C++ for applications which need to speed up critical sections of code.
Portability. I can take PHP code off my Linux box and plop it onto an IIS server, or even one of those new Macintosh servers and have it run without having to change a single line of code. Try doing this with Perl! Its as though it was written in assembly, Perl requires that much rewriting.
My Perl programs run on Windows, MacOS/X, VMS, all UNIXen, and many other platforms. Dunno what you've had trouble with, but I suggest you may have had trouble with Perl because you were not familiar with it.
Graphics. PHP comes with a nice little graphics library. While I wouldn't use its to code the new Doom (VB would be a better choice!) its adequate for most web pages, and should be considered as a substitute for Flash for certain things. Perl lacks a graphics library of any kind.
This is so wildly untrue, it's amazing! Perl has some of the most comprehensive graphics handling possible. From OpenGL to the GD module to PDL, Perl can do anything from complex scientific simulation graphics to simple 2 and 3-D charts and graphs to line-drawing. PDL requires special note. It's a library for dealing with arbitrary binary data in a number of ways from performing vast arrays of numeric transformations (e.g. Fourier Transforms, and other matrix transformations) to rendering graphics to modifying image data. It's a god-send for the scientific community that previously had to deal with proprietary systems that were of dubious value given that they could not be modified.
There's even a comprehensive interface to The Gimp, which I wrote an article on for The Perl Journal.
The Perl resource that you probably are not aware of (based on your comments) is the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN). There is a module list that gives you a nice index of everything that Perl can do that is not shipped with the binaries. Perl also provides a CPAN module that can be used to automatically download, compile and install anything from CPAN.