PHP Cookbook

CEHT writes "Like Tony Williams said in his review on PHP and MySQL Web Development: "PHP and MySQL are probably the most pervasive add-ons to Apache web servers across the web". And I agree with him. PHP is a very powerful scripting language, so developers (not just web developers) can do almost anything with it." Read on to see how well CEHT thinks O'Reilly's PHP Cookbook helps you do that almost everything. PHP Cookbook author David Sklar and Adam Trachtenberg pages 608 publisher O'Reilly rating 9 reviewer Edmond Lau ISBN 1565926811 summary Solutions and examples for PHP programmers.

The approach that the authors use in PHP Cookbook is great. Like most computer books, the authors usually include a summary (in sentence forms) to illustrate what the readers will expect in each chapter. Skalar and Trachtenberg take this even further by including some preliminary (code) examples to explain the general ideas behind each chapters. The examples in the book are self-contained. In most cases, I've found examples to exactly fit my needs -- this makes it one of the better reference books.

Each chapter in the book is divided into multiple sections of Problem / Solution / Discussion with a FAQ style. In each case, a simple description of a problem is followed by a PHP script as the solution. But the meat is actually in the discussions: in-depth details are included here, where the authors also include references, extended ideas, and scripts to inform the readers how much more they can do about the issue.

For example, I was going to add a simple script to my website to parse RSS/RDF files from certain news websites (CNN, Slashdot, ...), and use it as my Mozilla homepage. (Who wouldn't?) This script seems to be simple, but I may make a mistake here and there. As reference, I opened up the book to the section "Parsing XML with SAX." Then I realized the authors already had the script to parse RSS/RDF files in the discussion. Bravo!

For myself, the most useful chapters I found are: Web Basics, Forms, Database Access, and XML. There are also good examples in topics such as security, internationalization, and file processing/management. However, this book does not cover the basics of PHP. If you are a good programmer, you should be able to get away with this using the PHP Manual. A good book to learn PHP is Programming PHP, also by O'Reilly.

Although this book covers a wide range of topics, it does not cover topics like generating PDFs. I would also like to see the authors add one (maybe two) case studies in later editions. That would give the reader a more concrete example of how to combine tricks presented by this book. Other than that, at the price of $39.95 (or $61.95 CAD), this book is a great buy!

Topics

1. Strings
2. Numbers
3. Dates and Times
4. Arrays
5. Variables
6. Functions
7. Classes and Objects
8. Web Basics - available online as example chapter
9. Forms
10. Database Access
11. Web Automation
12. XML
13. Regular Expressions
14. Encryption and Security
15. Graphics
16. Internationalization and Localization
17. Internet Services
18. Files
19. Directories
20. Client-Side PHP
21. PEAR

You can purchase the PHP Cookbook from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

PHP Security

[leeroybrown]

One thing I would like to see more PHP books do is to cover the various Security problems that are prevalent in many PHP based web applications.

Don't get me wrong, I find PHP to be the best and friendliest solution for many things, but some of the Security problems could easily be avoided with some common sense security advice.

Re:PHP Security

[Albert Pussyjuice]

You are right - there is a general lack of books which deal with writing very fault tolerant and secure PHP code. Most of the PHP books I've seen in the stores start from the basics and focus on getting a database connection up and running and then doing some simple input/output/db access. I think that while PHP has taken off as a web language, this has hindered development a bit because everyone using PHP keeps running into the same problems and has to recode constantly to work around them.

Of course, writing secure code isn't specific to a language and any book on writing secure code should help to pave the way to avoid common mistakes, just substitute PHP for language X. For instance Writing Secure Code by Michael Howard could be a good companion book to any programmer's library.

Hopefully, in a few years PHP will have a large enough installed user base (as I think it already does) that the advances issues such as security, tolerance, etc. will be dealt with in entire book(s). Can you tell I am a PHP afficianado?

Re:More PHP

[cyt0plas]

/. itself may not be, but PhpSlash is. Also, I suspect the reason the slashdot crowd likes PHP so much is due to (among other things) a couple of reasons:

1 - It lets you mix html and code in. Sure, it's not the only language that lets you do it, but it's still a strength.
2 - It's free, open source (zend crap excluded)
3 - Microsoft hates it. That's always a plus.
4 - It's increadibly flexible and forgiving. Coming from a c background, this is one of it's most useful features to me. As far as I can tell, most programmers are inherantly lazy; They don't want to work harder than necessary to do a good job. In PHP, types are incredibly loose. If you want to use a string as a integer, a float, and a string all in the same line, you don't have to cast it. It just does it, and the incredibly vast majority of the time, it does just how you expected it to. Why can't C be that smart?