I have not read the book, but I'd like to comment on osCommerce. I had the questionable pleasure of setting up and customizing a shop using osCommerce. Installing - I admit - was a breeze, but what followed was the worst experience EVER.
osCommerce was programmed without any planning, thought or clue of anything; the code is hardly documented or commented. After a few weeks I started to understand how it all works, and believe me: I have never seen anything this big programmed so badly. I am talking about osCommerce 2.2 Milestone 2, which still seems to be the current version.
It starts with HTML: CSS is hardly used, most is inline - hard coded between the logic of course - and it is full of things like " " for horizontal or transparent gifs for vertical spacing. The level of table nesting achieved by osCommerce is beyond belief. Having four nested tables full of SPACES just to "indent" some text is not the exception, but the rule.
There is no template system (unless you call the ridiculous 'define' things they do for i18n a template system); logic and presentation are completely mixed, and a pain to edit thanks to some code lines which are several hundred characters long.
There is no abstraction layer to the database; most work is done directly using SQL. The DB layout is a nightmare, and the queries are painful to look at and even worse to work with.
Code is repeated all over; each and every page starts and ends with the same code. There's a reason people invented such difficult-to-grasp concepts as 'functions' or 'design patterns', but the osCommerce developers seem not to have noticed.
Extensions and patches are generally available as zip archives; incredible but true, the tools 'diff' and 'patch' seem to be unknown in the osCommerce world. The extensions/patches generally consist of a few PHP files and a README - often several pages long - saying things such as 'copy file a.php to catalog/admin/includes; then edit line 303 (the one after the long comment) of catalog/includes/classes/functions/some.file and replace every usage of 'x' by 'y'; then alter the table SOME_TABLE in MySQL...'. You get it.
There are tons of features - such as 'specials' or 'extras' and similar - which are integrated deeply enough to be a real pain to remove or deactivate if you don't need them; you'll have a hard time until you've rooted out the last trace of them.
osCommerce is a classical example of a program which started small (such as 'joe random hacker's simple and easy shopping cart'), and was then gradually 'extended' and 'patched' without foresight until it became the horrible beast it is now.
I will never do anything with osCommerce again. Ever.
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I have not read the book, but I'd like to comment on osCommerce. I had the questionable pleasure of setting up and customizing a shop using osCommerce. Installing - I admit - was a breeze, but what followed was the worst experience EVER.
osCommerce was programmed without any planning, thought or clue of anything; the code is hardly documented or commented. After a few weeks I started to understand how it all works, and believe me: I have never seen anything this big programmed so badly. I am talking about osCommerce 2.2 Milestone 2, which still seems to be the current version.
It starts with HTML: CSS is hardly used, most is inline - hard coded between the logic of course - and it is full of things like " " for horizontal or transparent gifs for vertical spacing. The level of table nesting achieved by osCommerce is beyond belief. Having four nested tables full of SPACES just to "indent" some text is not the exception, but the rule.
There is no template system (unless you call the ridiculous 'define' things they do for i18n a template system); logic and presentation are completely mixed, and a pain to edit thanks to some code lines which are several hundred characters long.
There is no abstraction layer to the database; most work is done directly using SQL. The DB layout is a nightmare, and the queries are painful to look at and even worse to work with.
Code is repeated all over; each and every page starts and ends with the same code. There's a reason people invented such difficult-to-grasp concepts as 'functions' or 'design patterns', but the osCommerce developers seem not to have noticed.
Extensions and patches are generally available as zip archives; incredible but true, the tools 'diff' and 'patch' seem to be unknown in the osCommerce world. The extensions/patches generally consist of a few PHP files and a README - often several pages long - saying things such as 'copy file a.php to catalog/admin/includes; then edit line 303 (the one after the long comment) of catalog/includes/classes/functions/some.file and replace every usage of 'x' by 'y'; then alter the table SOME_TABLE in MySQL...'. You get it.
There are tons of features - such as 'specials' or 'extras' and similar - which are integrated deeply enough to be a real pain to remove or deactivate if you don't need them; you'll have a hard time until you've rooted out the last trace of them.
osCommerce is a classical example of a program which started small (such as 'joe random hacker's simple and easy shopping cart'), and was then gradually 'extended' and 'patched' without foresight until it became the horrible beast it is now.
I will never do anything with osCommerce again. Ever.