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Book Review: Programming PHP 3rd Edition
Michael Ross writes "As a hugely popular scripting language with an 18-year history, PHP has been the topic of countless computer language books. One of the most comprehensive offerings has been Programming PHP, published by O'Reilly Media. The first edition appeared in March 2002, and was written by Rasmus Lerdorf (the original developer of PHP) and Kevin Tatroe. A second edition was released in May 2006, and saw the addition of another co-author, Peter MacIntyre. With the many changes to the language during the past seven years, the book has again been updated, to cover all of the major new features made available in version 5 of PHP." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review.
Programming PHP, 3rd Edition
author
Kevin Tatroe, Peter MacIntyre and Rasmus Lerdorf
pages
540
publisher
O'Reilly Media
rating
8/10
reviewer
Michael Ross
ISBN
978-1449392772
summary
An extensive tutorial of the PHP web programming language.
This third edition was published on 22 February 2013, under the ISBN 978-1449392772, with the same three authors at the helm. At a substantial 540 pages, the information is organized into 17 chapters, each focusing on a particular area of the language and its usage. This material precedes an appendix of almost 130 pages, which serves as a reference for all of the language's built-in functions. In fact, not only could this book suffice as a reference guide, it could also serve as a tutorial, because it is accessible to programmers of all levels, including beginners who have never before worked with PHP. The preface notes that the material assumes only "a working knowledge of HTML." However, the example code seems to also assume that the reader is comfortable with fundamental programming concepts, such as conditionals and loops.
To learn more about the book, prospective readers and buyers may wish to visit the publisher's website, where they will find a description of the book, its table of contents, a free copy of its first chapter, and the example code for ten of the chapters. Speaking of formats, the book is available in print and electronic media. (This review is based upon a copy of the print version kindly provided by the publisher.)
The first three chapters explain the bedrock fundamentals of the language, including its lexical structure, data types, variables, expressions, operators, flow-control statements, code inclusion methods, and functions. All of the information appears to be valid, aside from several technical blemishes: In Example 1-1, most of the lines of code are duplicated. Example 1-5, which supposedly creates a PNG file, does not seem to work. The section on constants (page 21) should have mentioned the core predefined constants and also distinguished those from magic ones. The binary literal 0b01100000 is 96, not 1 (page 23). It is claimed that an object is evaluated as false if it contains no values or functions (page 25), and yet: "class C{} assert( new C );." The closure example code (page 29) fails because it includes a function name and no terminating semicolon. The example code in the middle of page 66 contradicts the claim that an inner function "cannot be called from code parsed after the outer function." The example code starting at the end of that page fails because $a in foo() is undefined. Nonetheless, even experienced PHP programmers could pick up knowledge not encountered before, or at least refresh what was learned years ago and since forgotten due to disuse.
The next two chapters explore in detail further essential components of PHP: strings, regular expressions, and arrays. As with the earlier chapters, readers will encounter example code that does not appear to have been tested. For instance, the print_r() output of an object is missing the class name (page 84). On the same page, print_r() and var_dump() of $GLOBALS do indicate "*RECURSION*," but do not loop infinitely or three times, respectively, as claimed. The $record on page 86 is missing its trailing tab character. For these errors and others, it is not clear whether the authors or the technical reviewers are ultimately responsible. Regardless, readers should find useful the tables summarizing regular expression character classes, anchors, quantifiers, and options. On the other hand, the treatment of conditional expressions is sorely in need of examples. Also, readers will be baffled when told that "The preg_match() function takes the same arguments and gives the same return value as the preg_match() function []" (page 112). Lastly, the callback example code is faulty (pages 131, 133, and 141). The sixth chapter, covering object-oriented programming is well-written, aside from the confusing phrase "including it to a different name" (page 160) and the anti-Nietzschean "this will fatal" (page 161).
With Chapter 7, the book shifts gears from the basic underpinnings of PHP to more applied topics, in this case, web techniques — specifically HTTP, global variables, server information, web form processing, sessions, and more. The narrative is quite clear, except when the reader is told that periods in field names are converted to underscores because periods are illegal in PHP variable names (page 178); the connection is not explained. The next chapter looks at server-side data storage, including the topics of PDO, MySQLi, SQLite, and MongoDB. Confusingly, readers are told that the sample SQL database code is available in a file, but they are not told where to find it (http://examples.oreilly.com/0636920012443/).
Chapters 9 through 11 address PHP's support for three specialized file types: graphics, PDF, and XML. The explanations are excellent, and the authors provide numerous examples. The only obvious flaws are in Example 11-1 (page 269), where the echo statement is missing the "<?" and two of the lines have mismatched single and double quotes.
The remaining half dozen chapters cover critical aspects of PHP development. The chapter on security does not attempt to be exhaustive, but instead explains the most common attack vectors and how to block them. The chapter on application techniques discusses code libraries, templating, output buffering and compression, error handling, and performance tuning. Any programmer intrigued by the idea of replacing clunky VBA code with PHP, should be interested in Chapter 14, which explores the differences in running PHP on Windows vs. other platforms, with a brief look at manipulating the contents of Microsoft Word and Excel files using PHP. RESTful web services and XML-RPC are the topics of the next chapter, whose only apparent blemish is that json_encode() does not add spaces between the array values (page 339). The penultimate chapter addresses multiple environments, manual debugging, and the use of an IDE. The last chapter briefly covers PHP support for dates and times, and thus should have been located much earlier in the book, with the other material on fundamental concepts.
Overall, this book is quite approachable. Throughout, one will find programming style recommendations, However, as with any technical work of this size, there are passages that could be made more complete or clear. Occasionally the authors will mention something explained only later — e.g., "short echo tag" (page 60) — which can be frustrating to anyone new to a language.
The concepts of PHP being taught are extensively illustrated with example code. Some of it is concise enough so as not to distract from the narrative flow, but far too many examples involve much more code than necessary. This at first glance might seem to be an advantage, but it actually makes it more difficult for the reader to see the parts of the code relevant to the topic at hand. Also, the authors underutilize whitespace in the code, instead jamming tokens and parentheses together.
In a book of this size, we should not be astonished to find some errata: "Wordpress" (page xv), "try and" (same page; should read "try to"), "tick function registered when register_tick_function()" (55; should read "with" not "when"), "eXtensible" (59), "super-global" (67; should read "superglobal"), "display_classes() function" (vs. "function displayClasses()"; 164), "$var" (294 and 295; should read "$value"), "functions of blocks" (323; should read "functions or blocks"), "retried" (337; should read "retrieved"), and "a.k.a." (350; should read "e.g.").
In terms of the production of the book, like most other O'Reilly titles, this one is nicely put together, with readable font. But sometimes words are jammed together so much that lines appear to be a single word, e.g., "codeitselfbutplentifulenoughthatyoucanusethecommentstotellwhat'shappening" (page 17). Also, the publisher should avoid splitting the function names as if they were English words, e.g., "addc" and "slashes()" on separate lines (page 91). The index is missing some obvious entries, e.g., "closures." Many code snippets are missing the "Example" numbers and captions. This may be fine if the authors do not reference those snippets, but makes it problematic for anyone else to reference them.
Even though this is arguably one of the most comprehensive PHP books on the market, it does not cover all aspects of the language. On page 1, readers learn that PHP can be utilized in three major ways — server-side scripting, command-line scripting, and client-side GUI applications; but only the first is covered in the book. The appendix consumes over 120 pages, and comprises information easily available online in the PHP manual's function reference. Those pages could instead have been devoted to at least introducing command-line scripting and GUI applications. In fact, there are two major changes the authors could take in bringing this book much closer to perfection: Firstly, retest all of the code and root out any technical snafus. Secondly, replace the lengthy appendix with full coverage of the topics of command-line scripting and client-side GUI applications.
Regardless, Programming PHP is both a tutorial and a reference resource packed with information and example code. Benefiting from the author's deep expertise in the language and its usage, the book is the most promising single source for anyone who wishes to learn this ubiquitous web scripting language.
Michael Ross is a freelance web developer and writer.
You can purchase Programming PHP, 3rd Edition from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
To learn more about the book, prospective readers and buyers may wish to visit the publisher's website, where they will find a description of the book, its table of contents, a free copy of its first chapter, and the example code for ten of the chapters. Speaking of formats, the book is available in print and electronic media. (This review is based upon a copy of the print version kindly provided by the publisher.)
The first three chapters explain the bedrock fundamentals of the language, including its lexical structure, data types, variables, expressions, operators, flow-control statements, code inclusion methods, and functions. All of the information appears to be valid, aside from several technical blemishes: In Example 1-1, most of the lines of code are duplicated. Example 1-5, which supposedly creates a PNG file, does not seem to work. The section on constants (page 21) should have mentioned the core predefined constants and also distinguished those from magic ones. The binary literal 0b01100000 is 96, not 1 (page 23). It is claimed that an object is evaluated as false if it contains no values or functions (page 25), and yet: "class C{} assert( new C );." The closure example code (page 29) fails because it includes a function name and no terminating semicolon. The example code in the middle of page 66 contradicts the claim that an inner function "cannot be called from code parsed after the outer function." The example code starting at the end of that page fails because $a in foo() is undefined. Nonetheless, even experienced PHP programmers could pick up knowledge not encountered before, or at least refresh what was learned years ago and since forgotten due to disuse.
The next two chapters explore in detail further essential components of PHP: strings, regular expressions, and arrays. As with the earlier chapters, readers will encounter example code that does not appear to have been tested. For instance, the print_r() output of an object is missing the class name (page 84). On the same page, print_r() and var_dump() of $GLOBALS do indicate "*RECURSION*," but do not loop infinitely or three times, respectively, as claimed. The $record on page 86 is missing its trailing tab character. For these errors and others, it is not clear whether the authors or the technical reviewers are ultimately responsible. Regardless, readers should find useful the tables summarizing regular expression character classes, anchors, quantifiers, and options. On the other hand, the treatment of conditional expressions is sorely in need of examples. Also, readers will be baffled when told that "The preg_match() function takes the same arguments and gives the same return value as the preg_match() function []" (page 112). Lastly, the callback example code is faulty (pages 131, 133, and 141). The sixth chapter, covering object-oriented programming is well-written, aside from the confusing phrase "including it to a different name" (page 160) and the anti-Nietzschean "this will fatal" (page 161).
With Chapter 7, the book shifts gears from the basic underpinnings of PHP to more applied topics, in this case, web techniques — specifically HTTP, global variables, server information, web form processing, sessions, and more. The narrative is quite clear, except when the reader is told that periods in field names are converted to underscores because periods are illegal in PHP variable names (page 178); the connection is not explained. The next chapter looks at server-side data storage, including the topics of PDO, MySQLi, SQLite, and MongoDB. Confusingly, readers are told that the sample SQL database code is available in a file, but they are not told where to find it (http://examples.oreilly.com/0636920012443/).
Chapters 9 through 11 address PHP's support for three specialized file types: graphics, PDF, and XML. The explanations are excellent, and the authors provide numerous examples. The only obvious flaws are in Example 11-1 (page 269), where the echo statement is missing the "<?" and two of the lines have mismatched single and double quotes.
The remaining half dozen chapters cover critical aspects of PHP development. The chapter on security does not attempt to be exhaustive, but instead explains the most common attack vectors and how to block them. The chapter on application techniques discusses code libraries, templating, output buffering and compression, error handling, and performance tuning. Any programmer intrigued by the idea of replacing clunky VBA code with PHP, should be interested in Chapter 14, which explores the differences in running PHP on Windows vs. other platforms, with a brief look at manipulating the contents of Microsoft Word and Excel files using PHP. RESTful web services and XML-RPC are the topics of the next chapter, whose only apparent blemish is that json_encode() does not add spaces between the array values (page 339). The penultimate chapter addresses multiple environments, manual debugging, and the use of an IDE. The last chapter briefly covers PHP support for dates and times, and thus should have been located much earlier in the book, with the other material on fundamental concepts.
Overall, this book is quite approachable. Throughout, one will find programming style recommendations, However, as with any technical work of this size, there are passages that could be made more complete or clear. Occasionally the authors will mention something explained only later — e.g., "short echo tag" (page 60) — which can be frustrating to anyone new to a language.
The concepts of PHP being taught are extensively illustrated with example code. Some of it is concise enough so as not to distract from the narrative flow, but far too many examples involve much more code than necessary. This at first glance might seem to be an advantage, but it actually makes it more difficult for the reader to see the parts of the code relevant to the topic at hand. Also, the authors underutilize whitespace in the code, instead jamming tokens and parentheses together.
In a book of this size, we should not be astonished to find some errata: "Wordpress" (page xv), "try and" (same page; should read "try to"), "tick function registered when register_tick_function()" (55; should read "with" not "when"), "eXtensible" (59), "super-global" (67; should read "superglobal"), "display_classes() function" (vs. "function displayClasses()"; 164), "$var" (294 and 295; should read "$value"), "functions of blocks" (323; should read "functions or blocks"), "retried" (337; should read "retrieved"), and "a.k.a." (350; should read "e.g.").
In terms of the production of the book, like most other O'Reilly titles, this one is nicely put together, with readable font. But sometimes words are jammed together so much that lines appear to be a single word, e.g., "codeitselfbutplentifulenoughthatyoucanusethecommentstotellwhat'shappening" (page 17). Also, the publisher should avoid splitting the function names as if they were English words, e.g., "addc" and "slashes()" on separate lines (page 91). The index is missing some obvious entries, e.g., "closures." Many code snippets are missing the "Example" numbers and captions. This may be fine if the authors do not reference those snippets, but makes it problematic for anyone else to reference them.
Even though this is arguably one of the most comprehensive PHP books on the market, it does not cover all aspects of the language. On page 1, readers learn that PHP can be utilized in three major ways — server-side scripting, command-line scripting, and client-side GUI applications; but only the first is covered in the book. The appendix consumes over 120 pages, and comprises information easily available online in the PHP manual's function reference. Those pages could instead have been devoted to at least introducing command-line scripting and GUI applications. In fact, there are two major changes the authors could take in bringing this book much closer to perfection: Firstly, retest all of the code and root out any technical snafus. Secondly, replace the lengthy appendix with full coverage of the topics of command-line scripting and client-side GUI applications.
Regardless, Programming PHP is both a tutorial and a reference resource packed with information and example code. Benefiting from the author's deep expertise in the language and its usage, the book is the most promising single source for anyone who wishes to learn this ubiquitous web scripting language.
Michael Ross is a freelance web developer and writer.
You can purchase Programming PHP, 3rd Edition from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I stopped after i read about GOTO. Do you want raptors?
People still use PHP outside of Facebook? And, honestly, they're not even really using it with their cross compilers.
Ok you hate PHP. But how many other Popular alternatives are out there.
JSP Oracle is the bad guy right.
ASP Microsoft is the bad guy right.
Perl The 1990's called and they want their programming back.
Ruby on Rails, good alternative however it will be hard to find replacement programmers.
Python, Python is my favorite language, however it isn't that good for web.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Well.. if not PHP.. then what? And don't tell me C# or Java please.
There is a nice looking framework for Scala called Play. I think that could be a good alternative. http://www.playframework.com/
Get over your bias, and use whatever programming language needed for the job. I'll take a job doing PHP, perl, ruby, python, java, even actionscript. If I'm paid well, I'll learn it. My resume gives me the flexibility to get jobs using different languages, precisely because I'm not biased and have worked professionally in most of them.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
If you're using PHP and you've got something against Perl, you're a fucking idiot.
Honestly. If you can't offer a better solution, stop bitching about it. I and others have asked for something other than PHP for website programming over the past few articles and all I hear is bitching about how bad PHP is.
I use perl for sysadmin scripting stuff. I like perl. For sysadmin scripting stuff. It's a fricking pain in the ass to set up and maintain for the creation of web pages though.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Scala and Go would be good alternatives.
Lua + LuaJIT is can be interesting too.
GOTOs can be a useful language feature, improving program speed, size and code clearness, but only when used in a sensible way by a comparably sensible programmer.
Linus Torvalds: http://kerneltrap.org/node/553 (mirror at the Wayback Machine)
Steve McConnell: http://www.stevemcconnell.com/ccgoto.htm
Python can be pretty good for the web. If mod_python development had been more active it probably could have approached the market penetration of mod_php, because the reason why PHP got popular in the first place is because shared hosting providers could just build it into apache and forget about it, without having to babysit people's application servers chewing up ram while idle, and falling over and crashing every 30 minutes when not.
So what you're saying is that PHP is better than COBOL -- hmmm. PHP reminds me of those spider webs made by spiders on different drugs. PHP is like COBOL reimplemented under the influence of which drug, I wonder?
I swear, Slashdot only posts PHP stories to troll for negative comments...
Dark Reflection
If a job advertises they want PHP in pretty short order you are digging around their Perl code. If a job advertises they want .NET pretty soon you are trying to fix MFC code. I've seen this all throughout my career in programming most times these languages that seem easy or are popular...well usually its just a trap. This separates the men from the boys pretty quickly IMO. Cherry-picking is not for professionals and never has been. In the real world you learn this rather quickly if you intend to survive as a programmer.
Also don't tell me about c, c++, go, python, erlang, scala, ruby, groovy, or javascript! LALALALA
How many web hosts support it? That is why PHP still lives on.
Yeah, only idiots use PHP -- that's why it's only used by 80% of the web.
Language snobbery benefits no one. Unless you're Chuck Moore, it also makes you look like an idiot who can't form their own opinions.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Why isn't python "good for the web" ?
I'm not sure but it should run as long as you have Java. Scala compiles down to Java byte code.
Yup, as stupid as the Facebook bank balance.
"Lame" - Galaxar
My resume gives me the flexibility to get jobs using different languages, precisely because I'm not biased and have worked professionally in most of them.
Average HR Drone: "So, according to your resume you have 10 years of experience in C++, PHP, perl, ruby, python, java, and JavaScript. Well, you look wonderful for a man of no less than 93 years."
Dart might be interesting, when they stop changing everything...all the time.
"Lame" - Galaxar
Honestly, I don't understand what all the complaining is about. It just seems like a lot of language snobbery to me.
As someone who works with PHP every working day: It's a language that wasn't designed, it was congealed. Its lack of design is very evident as soon as you start trying to build anything interesting with it. It was something that was created to solve a short-term problem for one guy, and more-or-less accidentally grew into what it is today. What structures it does have are poor attempts at imitating other languages.
Some examples of what went wrong: - Arrays and hashes are the same data structure, for no readily apparent reason. Also, the simplest way of using that data structure is "array(a,b,c,...)", not "[a,b,c, ...]" like everyone else.
- All variables start with $, in imitation of Perl, but don't use the @ or % prefixes the way Perl does, instead just pretending everything's a scalar even though it's not.
- For a long time, OOP was an afterthought.
- Unlike other scripting languages like Python, Ruby, and Perl, PHP can't figure out which files to include for you when you reference something outside of the current file. Instead, it offers a global facility called an "autoloader" that allows you to write your own code to tell it how to find it, which completely breaks when multiple libraries have competing autoloaders trying to pick up two different classes with the same name.
- Library functions display no consistency whatsoever. Some are camelCase, some are under_scored. Some search functions put the needle before the haystack, some the other way around.
- Some operators are funky: Values can be equal without being the same thing, for example.
- A significant number of errors, instead of generating exceptions that can be caught and handled, generate fatal errors, which crash your application no matter what. By comparison, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Java allow you to handle almost any error.
I could go on, but the point is there's real reasons for hating PHP.
You could go on forever. Every day that I work on PHP code, I discover another absuridity in this moronic language. Here is today's: take the php function intval, which is meant to parse a string and return an integer:
- if you pass it an object, it emits an E_NOTICE and returns 1
- if you pass it NULL, an array(), and perhaps other things, who knows, it returns 0
- if you pass it a garbage string that is not a number it returns 0
- if you pass it a number with garbage appended it returns the number (e.g., "123aaaa" returns 123)
- if you pass it an overly large number it returns MAXINT
Apparently it did not occur to the people designing this that using valid return values to indicate error conditions is not a good idea.
Add to this, the fact that to know what a PHP API function REALLY does, you often have to read the comments under the API documentation page so you can find out of all the weirdnesses and special cases that the documentation does not mention.
+1 Insightful
There is never any good reason to use this broken by default "language".
However it is a great telephone interview question:
Interviewer: "Have you ever willingly used PHP or recommended it for any project"
Brain-dead amatuer pretending to be a professional: "Why yes"
*click*
Brain-dead amatuer pretending to be a professional: "hello? hello?"
Bulletproof way to remove the dregs from the list.
Of course any mention of PHP in a resume earns its spot in the paper shredder.
Either way, it helps narrow down your candidate list AND increases the quality of the candidate pool
Python, Python is my favorite language, however it isn't that good for web.
The standard for making a python application interact with a web server is wsgi, you can run it inside apache with mod_wsgi or run it in a dedicated server such as uwsgi. Or if you want to go asynchronous you can try tornado.
How is it hard to find replacement programmers for Ruby on Rails?
If you hire actual programmers that have not only domain knowlege but understand computation they will pick up both Ruby and Rails quickly.
Hire programmers, not programming language/framework end-users.
When you are writing a web app you can use whatever you like and there are a lot of good options:
Perl
Python(with or without the various framworks)
Ruby(with or without Rails or Sinatra) & JRuby
Smalltalk
Haskell
Lisp & Clojure
Ocaml
Scala
Erlang
Javascript(node or Rhino, maybe a few others)
even C++ has web frameworks if you really want C++
I am sure I missed about a dozen of so viable candidates
The only reason to use PHP is ignorance of the craft.
it also makes you look like an idiot who can't form their own opinions.
So does using the "but everyone else is doing it" argument.
I've used all kinds of languages for different purposes and the only thing I can say nice about PHP is that it is nearly as ubiquitous as Perl. Otherwise it is neither as capable or well thought out as it's competitors. My personal pet peeve is the inconsistent error handling (some functions just return true/false, some use NULL and false interchangeably, some write their error messages to STDERR, some to STDOUT, most give you no way to programmatically capture the error in a reasonable manner, and a few actually use the built exception functionality (though I still saw a handful that just used a generic exception with no details about the failure). The top failure of the language that gets the majority of my venom is their poor use of the __FILE__ macro and the maintainers refusal to recognize that they are the ones doing it wrong (translates links rather than giving you the raw value like every other major language).
Really the biggest problem with PHP is not the language itself, however, it's all the bad information out there about how to use it. Many of the helpful examples (especially for form processing or database work) are so full of security holes it's not funny. Sadder still is that it's the newbies that don't understand such concepts that read this bad advice as gospel and then continue to promote it by posting it again in their turn. All languages have their holes and flaws, but PHPs are more visible because of it's ubiquity (e.g. anyone can get a cheap hosting account that supports PHP) and because it drives the majority of the UIs on the web.
If your field of vision is PHP, C# and Java, you should find employment elsewhere like Walmart.
Yeah, only idiots use PHP -- that's why it's only used by 80% of the web
While I agree with your point about language snobbery, popularity doesn't imply user intelligence. There was a time when 80% of the web was written in Comic Sans with green text on a yellow background ;)
Disclaimer: I actually do like PHP, in spite of the inconsistencies that do admittedly plague it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
> you're a fucking idiot.
FTFY
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
+1 Insightful
+1 Informative
+1 Redundant
Python and Ruby are strongly typed, unlike PHP which doesn't even rise to the lofty title of weakly typed, stupidly typed is more accurate.
I am more familar with Ruby, so I will comment based on that, but my recollection of Python isn't much different. An object in Ruby is a specific type and will never be a different type, you can not coerce it(although you can get the object to return its representation in a different object: to_s, to_a, etc) to anything else and has no casting. You can't get much safer than that.
It also provides a mechinism that it cares more about what an object can do(the real point of OO) than what it is(Kingdom of nouns-profound misunderstanding of OO) unlike Java that requires so much verbosity to achieve the same effect.
Or are you referring to static and string typing Java style? You might want to know that many Java frameworks go to extreme contortions to get around its verbose and broken type system.
So does using the "but everyone else is doing it" argument.
That's not the argument I'm making :)
PHP is ubiquitous. That's certainly an advantage as far as maintaining it's share of the web. However, that didn't happen overnight. PHP is ubiquitous today because it did the job it was designed to do better than competing languages. This is still true today, as evidenced by several "superior" fad-languages failing to gain any ground. If PHP was garbage that no professional would touch, it couldn't have possibility achieved such an astonishing share!
You can criticize any language you want. With enough effort, you can make C appear to be the worst language ever improperly designed. (Just poke around the usenet archives and you'll see what I mean.) PHP has it's share of warts, no question, but it's not the worthless pile of garbage that language snobs have made it out to be.
Really the biggest problem with PHP is not the language itself, however, it's all the bad information out there about how to use it.
You'll find that's true of all popular programming languages. (You should see the nonsense out there about JavaScript -- written by respected professionals!) Though I'll admit that it might be a bit worse for PHP due to the large number of beginners the language attracts due to it's astonishing ease-of-use.
Really, I think that ease-of-use is exactly why we see so many "PHP is garbage" comments on forms like this. Developers are (undeservedly) considered by the general public to be brilliant-- a bit like MD's. The difference, of course, is that anyone can become a computer programmer in their spare time -- even children. Hell, I'll bet that the majority of Slashdot users were writing games for their home micro before the age of 12. It's an easy skill to learn -- and everyone developer knows it. Being insecure, the last thing they want is some easy language out there that's easy to learn and use. If their little secret got out, no one would think they were brilliant! They'd just be another nobody -- their worst fear!
Languages like PHP are a huge threat to those insecure developers. I'm not surprised that they bash it at every opportunity.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Not quite what I meant -- see my other reply. Apparently I can't communicate ideas today.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Nail, meet head.
Yes, Perl is a paragon of structure and consistency:
Exactly what the EXPR argument to when does is hard to describe precisely, but in general, it tries to guess what you want done. Sometimes it is interpreted as $_ ~~ EXPR, and sometimes it is not. It also behaves differently when lexically enclosed by a given block than it does when dynamically enclosed by a foreach loop. The rules are far too difficult to understand to be described here. See Experimental Details on given and when later on.
- Perldoc
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Software development will get easier, cheaper, and unprofitable and that's OK because that the nature of technological. The goal should be making tech easier to use and develop for.
The smart-match operator was fairly experimental from its introduction in 5.10 and was already disabled in 5.20, IIRC. Also, the Perl (5) interpreter relies quite a bit on heuristics to parse certain ambiguous syntax elements; you generally don't type them accidentally and when you do, the interpreter often emits a warning. Perl has never tried to be a strict language such as Java that beats you with a stick if you don't put parentheses after a method call.
"JSP Oracle is the bad guy right.
Don't have to use JSPs and don't even really have to go near Oracle. There are fully open source Java stacks.
"ASP Microsoft is the bad guy right."
Truly skilled high quality professionals don't care about fanboyism, they just use the best tool for the job. If that's ASP.NET then so be it.
"Perl The 1990's called and they want their programming back."
I'll let you have that, though I'd argue that Perl is both of a higher quality design in that it's been built with sound academic understanding at it's heart, and more thoroughly tried and tested. It's certainly not worse than PHP that's for sure, though I'd agree there are probably better alternatives now.
"Ruby on Rails, good alternative however it will be hard to find replacement programmers."
Not really, I guess it depends in part what level you're hiring at. Any senior developer or upwards worth his salt will be at a point in their career where you can throw a new language and stack at them and they wont care what it is, they'll just get on and work with it being up to speed in no time at all. It may be harder at junior levels or normal developer levels perhaps but I'm not convinced it would be any more an impediment than companies face hiring say, iOS or Android developers for example though admittedly not as easy as finding Java, C# and PHP developers (though purely PHP only developers tend to be low calibre so you should be asking if you really want them working on your software anyway).
"Python, Python is my favorite language, however it isn't that good for web."
Neither is PHP but that doesn't seem to be much of an impediment to people choosing to use it. I'd argue Python is better because it's learnt from many of PHP's mistakes in this respect.
I'm in the same place having worked on large PHP projects.
It doesn't mean it's a good technology though, it's still shit and if you're starting a project rather than taking one over then there's always a better option to choose than PHP unless the client stubbornly mandates it.
It really is high time PHP was phased out, there's just too many better alternatives out there, which if you're as experienced in other languages as you say I'm sure you already know.
I don't think anyone is saying don't use it if it's where the money is, but if you have the option then advise against it or outright opt for something else if the decision is yours.
Actively choosing it, nowadays, is outright negligent, and that's the problem.
That's nice. You are comparing lightweight interpreter (PHP) to a Scala which runs on beast called JVM and consumes a lot more memory just to start and print Hello world.
...) it's hard to not think about building a website in it. You get everything others have (MVC model, great ORM or other database layer, migration framework, etc.) and you can host it practically everywhere. It's cheap for testing and small sites, and reasonably priced for bigger sites.
... so there is no need to argue scalability, because PHP is scalable and fast enough for majority of web applications. From security aspect, modern PHP isn't any better nor worse compared to alternatives.
You can literally run tens or even hundreds of small PHP websites on a 512 MB VPS or even a few larger. You also shouldn't forget about shared hosting, where most of PHP websites are hosted (albeit those are small sites, but they represent majority of all sites written in PHP).
Nonetheless, PHP language is improving and with the number of powerful web frameworks (Yii, Laravel, CodeIgniter, Symfony, CakePHP,
Not everyone will create next Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google,
Just let people choose whatever language they are most comfortable with or fits theirs needs.
Python, Python is my favorite language, however it isn't that good for web.
Go home, comment. You're drunk.
Django, Pylons, Bottle, Flask, TurboGears, Zope, Web2Py...
And that's just some of the popular frameworks..
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
This book came out in Feb and is only now being reviewed? Any serious PHP programmer already has it, I would guess. It's the go-to, definitive PHP book. I skipped the second edition, but with all the changes to PHP recently (OO, etc) I got this one. Most PHP programmers probably have had all the editions. (I can't think of another PHP book I'd spend my money on.)
I think something newer would be a more interesting review. I'd review Stroustrup's new edition, but haven't been doing much C++ recently and haven't had time to read much of it.
The new Android Tablet Developer's Cookbook is interesting. I wish I had time to read it. It's the first advanced Android book I've seen - all the other books I've seen are the same introductory stuff over and over.
O'Reilly's JavaScript for PHP Programmers is also interesting. And cheap - it's one of the only O'Reilly books at about $15 I've ever seen. That's more Dover price territory! JS has been something I picked up with bits and pieces as I needed them. O'Reilly's JavaScript: The Definitive Guide is intimidating and TMI. The little JavaScript for PHP Programmers is much more concise. (And cheap!)
When I was in college, we wrote CGI in assembly!
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Seriously, most asinine thing ever (I think that was the point).
"Programming" is a bit of an overstatement if you're talking about PHP.
No - people without a chip on their shoulders understood exactly what you were implying.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I like Django... that's my preference for new projects, but I have a lot of older PHP projects, and some of the developers here are still creating and maintaining PHP sites, and I have no problems with them, either. PHP works well for what it was designed for; I love Python, but we've managed to do some pretty complicated and, more importantly, working sites in PHP. I have no problem with it.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Please tell us how PHP rocks to handle Unicode...
(breaks-out popcorn)
Good thing no one uses Scala to write hello world apps.
Since you are a PHP fan I can safely assume you are uneducated and don't know that trading space for time is a common tradeoff in the CS world.
Almost every algorithmic optimization is giving up memory to speed up execution. I have had difficult problems that were O(n!)-yes I know you don't know what it means, here read this if you can understand it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation - and took days to run without using branch and bound, which cut it down to a few minutes in the worst case. Of course, it increased the memory usage by about a factor of 3, but it was obviously worth it.
Long running apps that are properly written are screaming fast on the JVM which is why it is used server side so often.
PHP was never the best option, it was just easily grokable(at least in a very shallow sense) by amateurs which is the reason the web is so unsecure. Hacking any PHP app is trivial, amazingly Windows 7 and 8 are now more difficult to hack than PHP.
Ask Zuckerberg if he regrets using PHP and listen to him whine and moan about the tens of millions of dollars wasted to get around PHP's flaws.
Ask Lerdorf technical questions and be amazed at his ignorance. He hates programming by the way.
PHP by amateurs for amateurs.
LOL
So you are decrying the bandwagon while jumping on one?
Cognitive dissonance much?
At least I can give you valid reasons why I don't use PHP ever, and why I use the languages I do. Using actual arguments founded in computer science.
You use PHP because "everyone else does". You don't understand why it is a steaming pile of shit and you don't care enough to try to understand. You just hack and slash your way to a shitty solution. You are a typical PHP "programmer".