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PHP4 Web Development Solutions
In brief: The book, after some expository material, details 11 projects of increasing complexity. They use PHP, MySQL, PEAR::DB, Smarty and PHPLib. The target audience, according to the book jacket, are programmers who already have a good knowledge of PHP, SQL Databases and XML. Frankly, I think they overdo the amount of experience you need to use and benefit from this book. If you are on top of all those topics well enough to consider yourself "professional" then this book may be too simple. If, on the other hand, you are, like me, conversant with PHP and SQL but would like to take yourself up to "professional" use of technologies like XML, templating and WAP enabling then this book will be good.
What's Good About This Book
The book is stuffed full of code examples -- and while you can download them in a ZIP file of over 3Mb you shouldn't think of this book as a "cookbook" as such. It shows various methods for performing most of the tasks you need to build solid backend web site systems to deal with a large variety of data. The projects cover importing and exporting of XML, messaging systems, forums, content management, using templates for both HTML and WML, search facilities and both simple and complex content management among other topics.
The projects are well designed. I'd have to say that among the 11 projects most web site requirements are covered somewhere. The code is well engineered and some thought has gone into making it readable, understandable and useful. The explanatory material is well written, if too short.
One thing I did appreciate about this book is how much they left out. No coverage of PHP fundamentals, SQL fundamentals and simple stuff like web forms might be covered once, at most. I certainly didn't need another book on my shelves explaining the basics.
What's Bad About This Book
My largest criticism of this book is one shared by too many modern titles for computer programmers; there is too much explanation and too much repetition. The section on SQL is the perfect example. Most projects contain some tables describing each database table, a diagram of the relationships and then the full SQL required to build them, their indices and some example data. For their proposed target audience this is way too much information, and as it is safe to assume that everyone who buys this book has a decent 'net connection, why put a printout of SQL available online in a PHP book? I could have easily written the SQL myself and having it in the book doesn't make it much easier and since it was available online it was a total waste of space.
I also have to take exception to, an (admittedly short) chapter devoted to installing and configuring PostNuke. It gives you no more information on this simple task than the online documentation. As someone who has installed PostNuke a couple of times and never needed any assistance beyond the readme files (and the first was long before I considered myself a good PHP programmer) I felt this was a complete waste of space and not "web development" at all.
My final criticism is once again shared by too many modern titles, there isn't really enough discussion of the design decisions and complications. There are enough code examples and walk throughs to satisfy anyone, but not enough key design decisions are discussed at all, with only a few short examinations of any real design problems. I would have appreciated some walk throughs of such things as code that was too slow, problems with race conditions, methods for mixing static and generated parts of a site and all the real world stuff that intrudes when your site gets slashdotted and that code that was so neat with a hundred visitors a day becomes a thousand. Then show how the code they provide is better, avoids the problems and how to get my code to the same state. Since this book is "professional" a little more real world, please.
You can purchase PHP4 Web Development Solutions from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Please save the forest and use the much more concise PHP.net docs. Wrox and Sams should have to pay an environmental terrorism tax for the amount of pulp they process.
Seems Wrox is going great with PHP titles with pretty good collection coming one after another! Being into web development myself, this book has come as a great relief. It has given functions and methods with ready to use solutions. Could actually put them to use modifying them, plugging them in various applications. I only wish they had spent more time on procedural enhancement with static type analysis verification.
A must have for the Web Developers / Designers!
--Paul
I have not seen an unbiased answer to this question that has convinced me one way or the other. I use both on my site, all my new projects are PHP because its quicker, but mod_perl can be extremely powerful with the persistance of its threads.
To sum up, I don't believe an unbiased comparison is possible, and both PHP and Perl are fairly equal as web-scripting solutions right now.
An online Starcraft RPG? Only at
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
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I agree. Its a no-win situation. If Wrox put the code ONLY on the online version and not the book, it would get a whole new group of people annoyed about that. Can't please everyone, so its best to err on the side of caution. Additionally, the bit in the review that mentions the target audience is another one of those situations. If there were less information provided, people who believe themsleves to be strong in PHP but need *more* info would get upset. As it is, on the amazon reviews, at least one person was complaining that it didn't give enough information.