Professional PHP4

Henry Birdwell contributes the following review of Wrox Press's Professional PHP4. Read on for his impressions, and to see if this book is right for your own dynamic web programming tasks. Professional PHP4 author Luis Argerich et al pages 975 publisher Wrox Press rating 9 reviewer Henry Birdwell ISBN 1861006918 summary Comprehensive print resource for working PHP programmers.

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

• The official PHP web site
• Zend - the PHP scripting engine

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.

Comments

Re:PHP5?

[Lordrashmi]

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.

PHP Website

[TheFlyingGoat]

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.

Re:PHP Website

[smack_attack]

Ask and ye shall receive

Not Deep Enough

[ze_lee]

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...

So extend PHP

[Ron Harwood]

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...

Re:Please listen up to my noteworthy advice

[mgkimsal2]

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.

Re:Please listen up to my noteworthy advice

[Matts]

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).

PHP is good but TAL is the next generation of SSI

[Qbertino]

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.

Re:This book is great

[nahdude812]

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.