Not what I was looking for
I'm using this book for a class. Most of the students have had bad experiences with PHP before this -- I'm one of them. The back of this book states it is rated for an Intermediate/Advanced user level. The rating is totally accurate. Unless you have a basic but decent PHP background you will be lost. The author uses special characters, terms, etc. that are not previously defined, and assumes a basic understanding of programming. If you do not have a basic understanding of programming and an elementary knowledge of PHP, find another book. This one does not give enough background in PHP to get a novice up to speed.
Best PHP book in my collection
This is a wonderful book. The code is easy to understand and is broken down. Eric did a wonderful job with this book. I successfully developed a member management system thanks to this book.. I give it five stars.
doesn't give much coverage of Web Services
Rosebruck gives a book well suited to you if you have already done some PHP, but want to migrate to the more complex challenge of using it to make a website. He shows how this is harder than just writing PHP to make 1 HTML page. Now you have many pages. Probably divided into various thematic groups.
Of those groups, or tasks, he gives examples. Like hooking to a back end database. He chooses MySQL for the latter. Or, how to impose a membership system, with passwords and members-only pages. Plus, how to add a shopping cart and various payment scripts. And he shows quickly how a content management system might be used, so that visitors can read and write content.
However, the book's coverage of Web Services is very rudimentary. In this aspect, the prominent billing in the title is a trifle misleading. If you need a text on it, look somewhere else.
Misleading title on web services
This book has a misleading title. It has a small section talking about web services API by amazon. This book would help a beginner PHP programmer though.
Immediate productivity, unlike many other coding books
I am a graphic designer turned web designer with years of experience now coding HTML and CSS directly. Wanting to broaden my overall web site development abilities I started looing at books on basic scripting and database development for creating more efficient and dynamic sites. My interest was not to learn PHP for the sake of knowing another language and becoming a master programmer (as the aim of most other programming books out there seems to be), but to find a book that was geared toward immediately effective and productive learning-while-building with programming and database basics, for someone who hasn't done those things before. This book seemed to have posed the same question as myself, and out of the shelves and shelves of 'standard' programming books this one answered my query.
(24 reviews)
