Recommended Reading List for PHP

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."

Comments

Forgot one

[Anonymous Coward]

They forgot the most important article on PHP! What it is:

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/PHP

Re:Forgot one

[Overly Critical Guy]

Wow! Thanks for the heads-up!

Re:Queue anti-PHP jokes...

[Jason Earl]

If PHP developers could read they would be using Python...

Thanks, I will be here all week...

PHP 5 Power Programming (Gutmans)

[pestilence669]

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

Re:Ah, yes

[lymond01]

Meh. For web-based applications on a small to medium level, PHP is the way to go. You can say it's just a scripting language and therefore not a "real" programming language if your definition of "real" does not include a language with defined syntax, for loops, variables, arrays, system calls, objects, classes, etc.

But then what would you call it? An egg? No...that's taken by those round things chickens lay. I've no idea really. I'll just go with programming language and leave the modifiers out.

ISBN-13 is upon us!

[XanC]

978-0-13-147149-8

Useful article++... Am I lost?

[Duncan3]

Not a dupe...
Actually useful...
First post wasn't about a Beowulf cluster or Soviet Russia...

What happened to Slashdot???

My faith will be restored if this article is duped within 24 hours.

Re:How about this

[temojen]

How about compulsory reading of a C++ or Java OO book, even before you know what "var $myVar" is.

I've used C, C++, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, Scheme, Prolog, Cobol, plPGSQL, x86 Assembler, VAX Assembler, 68hc11 Assembler, and TCL, and I don't know what language you'd use the statement "var $myVar" in.

Re:Queue anti-PHP jokes...

[homebrewmike]

And if Python developers could code, they would be using Java.

Troll status, here I come!

Re:Why all of the PHP postings?

[Tim Browse]

PHP is a pretty niche language with little theoretical power.

Thanks - I've only just stopped laughing.

Are you here all week?

Nooo!!!!

[drew]

And this is why I hate web programming and web programming languages:

It provides resources for developers and admins adopting PHP and tackling advanced topics such as building extensions and writing secure code.

Why is this considered an advanced topic? Security should be the first thing anyone writing software for the web learns. And web programing languages need to make it easy to write secure code by default. *Sigh*

Re:Nooo!!!!

[caffeination]

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.

Re:Nooo!!!!

[Hosiah]

is that how perl is

Perl: Take every programming language you know now. Mix them all together. That's Perl. No, not the functionality, just the syntax.

Re:Nooo!!!!

[Craig Maloney]

The reason people find PHP so insecure is because you can plop a script practically anywhere on the server, and have it run. So, if one of the scripts allows someone to upload somewhere where they shouldn't, BAM, you're compromised.

I've found this out first-hand with a few PHP scripts I've run. It's amazingly easy to set up, but it's also a discipline in itself to ensure it keeps crackers out.

Just learn from the examples.

[caluml]

Only thing I've ever needed to read to learn PHP is fr.php.net. (Because the UK mirror is slower.)

Templating systems

[Spy der Mann]

This one's an ABSOLUTELY MUST-READ for those who don't know what template engines are:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/beyond-template-e ngine

5 good PHP sites

[Anthony Boyd]

Their list is great -- I'll be reading some of those articles for weeks before I get through them all. I'm especially interested in the 7 security blunders article. Nice!

But they did leave off a lot of sites that are useful. Here are a few:

• PHP Resource Index - a few thousand scripts for downloading, most free, all PHP.
• PHP Builder Forums -- the PHP Builder site is pretty useful all by itself, but in the forums there are thousands of people willing to answer your PHP questions.
• PHP Freaks -- one of the guys behind this site wrote a great PHP book. The site is excellent.
• ADOdb Database Abstraction Layer -- okay, okay, this isn't really a site, so much as a product. But still, it's a very efficient DBAL, and it should be used for every database query.

Anyone want to pitch in with some more? I'm sure there are some very useful sites that I've completely missed (and which the IBM site missed, too).

PHP Rocks in time spent!

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

Re:PHP Rocks in time spent!

[Jesus_666]

Well, PHP is useful for general purpose scripting. I went from web scripting to shell scripting and I'm much more proficient at PHP than I am at Python or sh, so when I have to write shell scripts I usually go with PHP. Yes, I know that sh is faster. Yes, I know that Perl has better PR. But I can just crank out a PHP script in half the time it takes me to read awk's manpage or whatever I need to get that sh script going.

It might not be the cleanest language around, but it allows for fairly rapid script development when you're familiar with it. Also, it has the most useful documentation of any scripting language I have ever seen, even more useful than Java's API documentation.

Re:Queue anti-PHP jokes...

[Senzei]

And if Python developers wanted to drown in xml, they would be using Java.

There, fixed that type for you.

Re:PHP, the web standard

[Senzei]

The web hasn't standardised on PHP, there is an emacs mode for it, and you will probably come to hate it.

It has always seemed like the bash of web programming, except uglier and slightly more difficult to use. It works, but if you push it too hard or the wrong way it feels like you are trying to make a mud sculpture.

Re:Queue anti-PHP jokes...

[caffeination]

There, fixed that typo for you.

There, fixed that typo for you.

Schlossnagle's "Advanced PHP Programming"

[MattW]

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.

Re:Queue anti-PHP jokes...

[forkazoo]

I tried to add my joke to the queue, but do to a weak implimentation of object orientation and inconsistency, I was just left befuddled as to whether I needed to AddJokeToQueue, joke2queue, add_joke, etc. So, I gave up and just put my joke on rails... /me ducks...

Seriously, I love PHP, but I think that it is designed to require having the docs handy... :)

Re:PHP, the web standard

[edwdig]

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.