Absolutely frustrating
I have to agree with everyone else here when they say that this book is absolutley packed with grammatical and coding errors. I already have a basic knowledge of PHP and a strong grounding in other languages so at first it was easy for me to see the errors and correct them, but now that I'm getting into the more complicated apsects such as file handling, I'm getting super-frustrated trying to figure out why things don't work. It has more errors than a Friends of Ed book. I'm going back to the store and picking up the O'Reilly book. They've never let me down.
Mr Tansley PLEASE hire an editor and a coder to check syntax
VERY frustrating.. (I had written a long review but when I went to submit I accidentally hit the BACK button on my mouse. ugh) So.. I am just going to say that this book would be best if you paid about 4 dollars for it. BUT you would HAVE to have a proven php manual that covered PHP 4.1(and up) to really learn php. This book is so awfully edited. I went through about 5 hours of searching google to reference his code. I am a complete PHP newbie. He has a few lines of code that are completely broke... silly syntax errors (# instead of = , !! instead of ++). But for the newbies, this can be way too frustrating when you find that the author (your teacher) is to blame. I am now about half way through this book and have found its one enormous fault. It's written for PHP 4.0. There are some major security issues with the way he approaches html form variables. He uses the "old way". So if you have PHP 4.1 or greater installed then some of the code he lists will NOT work, by default. This sent me on a wild goose chase for several hours. You will have to change default settings that can lead to the vulnerability of your scripts. I finally went to the php manual (php.net) and found the compatibility problems with his examples and my php install (4.2.3). If you really want this book to be effective you are going to have to use old PHP techniques that are proven insecure in this day and age. I assumed with a 2002 publishing date that the book was up to snuff. Despite these major frustrations and snafus, I have been able to learn php. David explains his code very well. He assumes you don't know what is going on. I would say that anyone can learn some php from this book but don't make it your primary source. I think one would be better off learning from a book that focuses on formal/clean coding and 100% working examples. Also beware; his writing is full of typos as well. I am no linguist but seeing the silly errors he makes in his diction leaves me to wonder how serious he is about actually teaching and not rushing it out for the publisher. It reads as if he wrote it and never read back over the pages. So, I will be on the lookout for something better.
Mr Tansley PLEASE hire an editor and a coder to check syntax
VERY frustrating.. (I had written a long review but when I went to submit I accidentally hit the BACK button on my mouse. ugh) So.. I am just going to say that this book would be best if you paid about 4 dollars for it. BUT you would HAVE to have a proven php manual that covered PHP 4.1(and up) to really learn php. This book is so awfully edited. I went through about 5 hours of searching google to reference his code. I am a complete PHP newbie. He has a few lines of code that are completely broke... silly syntax errors (# instead of = , !! instead of ++). But for the newbies, this can be way too frustrating when you find that the author (your teacher) is to blame. I am now about half way through this book and have found its one enormous fault. It's written for PHP 4.0. There are some major security issues with the way he approaches html form variables. He uses the "old way". So if you have PHP 4.1 or greater installed then some of the code he lists will NOT work, by default. This sent me on a wild goose chase for several hours. You will have to change default settings that can lead to the vulnerability of your scripts. I finally went to the php manual (php.net) and found the compatibility problems with his examples and my php install (4.2.3). If you really want this book to be effective you are going to have to use old PHP techniques that are proven insecure in this day and age. I assumed with a 2002 publishing date that the book was up to snuff. Despite these major frustrations and snafus, I have been able to learn php. David explains his code very well. He assumes you don't know what is going on. I would say that anyone can learn some php from this book but don't make it your primary source. I think one would be better off learning from a book that focuses on formal/clean coding and 100% working examples. Also beware; his writing is full of typos as well. I am no linguist but seeing the silly errors he makes in his diction leaves me to wonder how serious he is about actually teaching and not rushing it out for the publisher. It reads as if he wrote it and never read back over the pages. So, I will be on the lookout for something better.
Not for beginners
Overall I found this book to be very frustrating. I have some programming and web experience, but not a lot. This is my first effort at creating a web page from scratch rather than updating an old one. I will start by being positive. What I do like is how the author explains the scripts used in the exercies. He starts at the beginning of the script and says what is happening as the script progresses. Now for the negative. This book is poorly written. Typos abound, including in the scripts. It is very frustrating to spend time trying to figure out why a script won't run when you've typed everything in as you are told. It is also not written very professionally. The language tries to come off as a layman, however the bad grammar and incorrect punctuation makes it come off as ignorant.
Easy to use, but watch out for typoes
I am learning quite a lot about using PHP and MySQL to create webpages, as the title promises, but the challenge is fighting my way through the lackadasical copyediting. When a six-line script has two typoes in it, as does one on page 29, it doesn't exactly fill me with confidence as to the rest of the scripts. Hopefully the second edition will be copyedited a little more closely.
(8 reviews)
