Rating: 
Summary: Simply Wonderful!
Review: The book is simply a wonderful collection of useful applications and proper documentation of those. Everyone should keep a copy of the book, becuase it will come real handy while developing such applications. While describing the applications, the writer rightly considers reader's perspective. That, for me, was the most wonderful aspect of this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Spend your money on dinner instead of this headache
Review: The horror. The horror. This book is just a big disappointment. After 2 weeks of giving it a chance, I found out that there are several security holes in the php scripts. I will not reveal them here, but I will give you one hint: javascript. "Secure PHP Development"...yeah right. This book contains mostly cut and paste scripts that haven't even been reviewed. Lots of redundent functions and script errors. Even worse, it violates the most fundamental rule in programming. That is documentation. There are no documentation in the scripts. You will have to enter them yourself. Oh, by the way, this framework he designed doesn't run on windows. It is written for Linux, although when you buy it there are no obviouse hints to tell you this. God help you if you buy it.
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Summary: What's up with the Restrictive Software License?
Review: This looks like a good object-oriented framework for building PHP apps, but what is up with the restrictive license that accompanies the programming examples in the book? (see the back page of the book, and the license.txt file on the disk) "You may not (i) rent or lease the Software, (ii) copy or reproduce the software through a LAN or other network system or through any computer subscriber system or bulletin- board system, or (iii) modify, adapt, or create derivative works based on the Software." I've never seen a book try to restrice the programming examples in this way. Stay away if you intend to build professional products. There are many other frameworks available for PHP OOP.
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Summary: Only 20 pages of "secure development techniques"
Review: When I saw this book at the local bookstore (one of only 10 PHP related books in stock), I thought, "Awesome! I've been looking for some more securing applications techniques." It turned out to be a big let down. The book is roughtly 750 pages (large print), the first 50 or so was an introduction and gave a few bad examples vs. good examples of code (which was good, and actually made me think the rest of the book was going to be good), then jumped directly into "here's 650 pages worth of class based applications for you to use". The last 40-50 pages of the book was a chapter called something to the effect of "Optimizing and Securing PHP". Of the whole book, this was the most dissapointing aspect, split equally between the 2 topics. I thought the whole book was going to be about writing secure PHP, not just 20 pages. Even the sample code they gave was in my opinion, poor. The author encouraged a strong misuse of OOP, having every single script have its own class dedicated to it. For example, one of the 50 "ready to use applications" was for handling users for their intranet. They wrote a class with methods for updating the user's information, adding a user, selecting the user's email address from the database, etc. The goal of OOP is to be abstract so that it can be used in more than one area, something the author didn't bother to learn before he wrote this book. Even the optimizing portion of the last chapter was a big let down. It felt like there was really only one example of code optimization. The rest of the pages explained how to make a particular PEAR script do a speed test on your code. How is that supposed to help me if I'm not even certain how to write it more efficiently? I'm not interested in a book that shovels me a bunch of code the author wrote. If I wanted free code, there's tons of sites out there for that. I want a book that's going to teach me how to think more securely and write more securely and think about the best/most optimized way to write a particular portion of code. Sadly, this book isn't it.
Rating:
Summary: Got intranet working!
Review: With the help of this book, I created a basic intranet with many apps including a timecard, messaging app, calendar, contact book etc. only in 3 days!
Wow! Love it!
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