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Recommended Reading List for PHP

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the i'm-told-that's-a-popular-drug dept.

Steve writes "IBM developerWorks has put together a PHP recommended reading list. It provides resources for developers and admins adopting PHP and tackling advanced topics such as building extensions and writing secure code. There's also a list of books and blogs for keeping up with changes to the language itself."

5 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. PHP 5 Power Programming (Gutmans) by pestilence669 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This book was Slashdotted a few months ago. It's written and endorsed by members of the core PHP team. It's the most accurate language resource I've come across. It covers the PHP language, while I've found that other books tend to offer cookie-cutter "recipes" for common scenarios (code snippets). Sadly, its mention of interfaces is a bit sparse and it pre-dates PHP 5.1's PDO. Nevertheless, I still find it very relevant for anyone doing OOP with PHP. There are one or two gems not found in the online documentation.

    NOTE: It's better to have some PHP programming experience before reading.

    ISBN: 0-13-147149-X

  2. PHP Rocks in time spent! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    PHP is a powerfull language not only for the web, but for general purpose programming. Please, experienced C and C++ programmers do a favor to yourselfs and give it a try, testing algorithms can be done in a very short little time, in contrast to other languages.
    It's a breeze in the ocean!

    http://www.codingheaven.net/ http://www.codingheaven.net/

  3. Re:Nooo!!!! by caffeination · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Out of honest curiosity, is that how perl is? I'm a fledgling programmer myself, using PHP. There's a lot of talk about it being insecure, and not being a True Programming Nerd, I have no real idea why.

    This itself raises the issue that if a language is too easy to write securely by default, people starting out in it won't learn to think about security when they code, which is a short term vs long term thing. The phrase "too secure" does sound a little moronic though...

    For the record, my code is incredibly paranoid. I'm probably not very representative though, being a much-less-new security conscious Linux user.

  4. Schlossnagle's "Advanced PHP Programming" by MattW · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm glad to see that at the top of the list. I haven't read all those php books, but I am a very experienced developer in the language, and that book is fabulous. It manages to cover many topics, and with astounding clarity and insight. Definitely a master work on the topic.

  5. Re:PHP, the web standard by edwdig · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you think PHP is ugly, try looking at ColdFusion. Same basic idea as PHP, but you get to write you code in HTML style syntax. You also get Fortran style operators (gte instead of >=, lt instead of <, etc) Damn near impossible to quickly glance at large block of code and figure out what's going on. The code doesn't stand out from the HTML, and you've got a ton of keywords due to all the information being passed HTML attribute style.

    Fun stuff like this...

    <cfloop index="i" from="0" to="10" step="1">
        <cfif i mod 2 is 1>
            <cfoutput>#i# is odd</cfoutput>
        <cfelse>
            <cfoutput>#i# is even</cfoutput>
        </cfif>
    </cfloop>

    You also get some really odd language decisions. For example, when they first added support for functions there were no return values. To work around this, you had a special local variable called "caller" which was a structure containing the local variables of the previous scope. They eventually fixed this, but PHP's language problems don't look so bad compared to that.