PHP BLACK BOOK IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
I went from knowing some HTML before I bought this book, and after reading PHP Black Book I was able to dive into PHP right away. I am now a developer of a Content Management System which implements PHP and a MySQL database, which I owe alot of credit to this book. Peter Moulding has done an outstanding job writing this book! Though I do admit some of the example code is incorrect, everything that is written and meant to teach you something succeeds with flying colors.
This is also an excellent PHP reference book. Anytime I am in doubt of something, or need to double check something, this book has the answer. It was well worth the money!
could have been a lot better
i read this book , i read this book again and i read this book thrice . except for a few things there is nothing that helped me . Most of the examples are poor to follow and many of them do not work .the only thing that can be learnt from the book is that there's nobody else in the world who can program better than Peter Moulding . Peter Moulding is a guru , he has learnt 50 websites , 25 years of experience , lots of languages etc. etc. etc. and other people who make websites are foolish but call themselves 'experts' .
I am not writing this because of frustration but thats how the book really is
Much Ado about PHP Black Book
This is not a very well-organized book. The examples are generally over-simplified. My biggest complaint, however, is with the cd rom - it includes "Source Code" from the examples in the book. The source code is merely all of the snippets of code in each chapter jammed into a few html pages. For example chapter 17, "Objects" has several "Example" pages which do not work because objects are illegally redefined several times within the same page. The author does spell it all out in the chapter, but the examples are simply not usable.
Learning PHP can be fun and effective with this book
I've bought a couple of PHP and other programming books that were good and when I ordered the PHP Black Book, I never thought that this would become my desk reference and partner on work. Why? Because it has a simple, interesting, fun reading and because it is so well written and organized that you wont get lost on chapters and subjects.
For me, it is not one more book, this has become The Book and if you're considering PHP programming, you've got it all here with fun and professionalism.
A few decent examples... but that's about it
I bought this book expecting it to be an exhaustive resource on how to start programing with PHP. I went into it with relatively little knowledge of server side programing, but the back of the book promised to fill me in on all the relevant details. It didn't.The book is organized into chapters on general subjects with an "intermediate solutions" and a "in depth" section in each. While it might make some sense for a book, the organization makes reading the book chronologically not work at all. Even the reference is shody at best, very irratic. It includes reference to virtually useless date functions for coverting between dates in the jewish and the roman calenders in the second chapter! The section on the MySQL database includes how to insert rows into a database and create tables, but not how to update or delete entries! Such erratic relevance is present throughout the book - there are many several page long sections which give a one sentense long description to an entire class of rarely used functions. Not only are the functions not especially useful, but the brief and cursory explainations mean that one would have to use another reference material to get them working in the first place. Additionally, many excerpts of complex code are presented without sufficient explaination of the basic concepts behind them. It's not explained well enough to impart a mastery of the skills upon the reader. The book sets out to be both a teaching tool and a reference material, but fails miserably on both accounts. One would be far better off merely learning the stuff at the PHP.net, as I was told when I asked on usenet for recommendation of a book and I foolishly ignored. At least the reference there is complete. Some subjects that are important today (that may not have been at the time of writing), such as setting register_globals to off in the php.ini settings are not even mentioned in the book.
The other annoying aspect of the book is the author's sense of humor and his stories. As was mentioned in another review, it's fine if the material is good, but really is just fluff that covers up holes. His disdain for JavaScript is understandable, but uncalled for. When an author poorly describes even just the basics of a programing language, his extra comments aren't appreciated nor helpful. We'll be writing code that works worse than the poorly writen code of so called "professional" websites that he mentions his hate for many times, with only his book as a resource.
Yes, the book does have a few useful excerpts and sections, but until the reader has a well educated knowledge of the subject, far beyond what the book imparts, it doesn't help at all. There's no compensation for the gaping holes in the text.
(18 reviews)
