A must have book for every level PHP programmer!
Core PHP Programming is the best PHP book I have read. The book covers pretty much every subject you can expect it to cover. What I especially like about the book is the way how the topics are structured in the book, which makes it easy to find what your looking for. Once you have found the function you need, you will appreciate the clear example that comes along with each function. The book goes further than just giving you the sum of properties, it describes it in great detail and also gives you advice. Eventhough the book holds much information, thanks to Leon Atkinson's writing the book is easy to read and understand. Because of this you can use the book as a study guide to learn PHP as a novice. I used the book to prepare for my Zend Certified Engineer PHP5 exam, for which I past this month. Experienced programmers will also appreciate the book as a reference guide on their desk. Every PHP developer should have a copy of this book in his personal library.
-- Ron Velzeboer, creator of TemplatePower
No index?
I don't know if this is a good book or not.
The two copies in my local bookstore had no index, making the book nearly useless. The table of contents says that there is an index on such-and-such a page, but in both copies the book stopped at the last appendix, one page before page given for the index in the table of contents.
Perhaps this is a printing error on one batch. I see that one other reviewer found the same thing.
A reference book without an index
This is a 1000+ page programming reference book that has omitted an index. How do the authors think readers can turn to this book to look up the syntax and usage of a function without an index to find it? I own a copy of the 2nd edition (that has an index) that is falling apart. This one is not useful for more than a paper weight unless you plan to read it like a novel. Perhaps the publisher in charge just transfer from the fiction section.
Like many other reviews, I feel that the examples are weak. You have to have a high level of PHP knowledge to understand many of them.
Not for PHP programmers
"Core" PHP in the title, and Z.Suraski among the authors triggered my desire to acquire the book. Being a "hacker", fond of systems, C, C++ and Java, I was expecting a book from a PHP contributor to be plenty of useful tips, recommendations etc...
What a disappointment. This is an incomplete and disorganized self-congratulatory reference.
Authors, probably paid by the page, integrate useless data separated by numberous blank pages.
Just 2 examples:
- 7 pages of the result of the command "configure --help", without comments. Completely useless.
- 4 pages to talk one page of "PHP tags"! (you know the < ?php >)
The description of the PHP functions is botched up and incomplete. Listings (samples) are numberous, but unfortunately they are rarely relevant for complex functions. Moreover the function title itself is only headed in "bold" while listings titles are bordered and shaded - it makes the whole hard to read/search.
Regarding the documentation of functions, when they're off the beaten track, usually the authors get their "joker"... << A full discusion of xxx is beyond the scope of this book >> (e.g. see the shared memory). Being a system hacker, the book often gave me the impression that the author(s) don't master what they talk about.
Self-congratulation: if you contributed to the open-source PHP, first, congratulations! PHP is a wonderful language, easy to use, easy to debug, performing well ; his numberous authors around the world deserve a big "Congratulation!". However when it comes to program PHP, one need a serious book talking in details about what we need in our daily work, as programmers. In this book you'll find tons of self-congratulory references, naming lots of people, but not actual material to help your work as a programmer. Well, if this is your intention to know more about the history of PHP, or if you belong to the list of people, go for it, you will get your [free] refill of EGO if you need that.
So let's talk about the key to the book, its index:
Thus, if you are looking for ...
M.Adler, J.Ahto, C.Alexander, T.Arntzen, S.Bakken, H.Bergius, A.Black, M.Boeren, S.Caraveo, J.Clark, E.Dijkstra, D.Eriksson, J.Gaill, A.Gutmans, C.Hagenbuch, S.Hughes, A.Isaacs, A.Karajannis, K.Koehntopp, F.Kromann, M.Matsumoto, T.May, P.Melo, T.Nishimura, L.Philips, E.Raymond, M.Rodeh, S.Ruby, R.Schwartz, D.Stenberg, Z.Suraski, G.Thomson, A.Slooten, E.Warnke, J.Zitting, A.Zmievski...
... you are lucky! They're all in the book
However if you have to *work* with PHP, don't look for instance for these important keywords, they're *not* in this book index: global, Super..., header(), strpos(), lock()...
Actually, it was so irritating not to find what I was looking for that php.net became my reference...
Hard to believe that honest people, besides the ones that contributed to PHP itself, can give more than 2 stars to this book. I believe authors have many friends :)
a welcome addition
Leon has done it again... given us a book that developers need and will use. I own a lot of books on PHP. But I ALWAYS refer back to Leon' first Core PHP book when in the midst of creating the perfect solution. FYI: I did not find enough reasons to buy the second edition, covering PHP v4.x. True, there is little on each database. As it should be... one only needs to know how to use PHP with their RDBMS of choice. Which this book does well. I have created world class solutions, secure, money making web sites, and Leon's efforts have made it easier for me to get more done in less time. As one reviewer pointed out, this book may not be for everyone. As programmer of "C", Delphi/Pascal, Perl and tons of cgi-bin scripting, his approach is perfect for me.
(27 reviews)
