PHP 5 Power Programming (Bruce Perens Open Source)

Rating:
Summary: Assumes You Know PHP and are Moving Up.
Review: If you're going to start off learning to build database driven web sites today, you probably want to use LAMP. LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Each of these technologies is complex enough that a dedicated book, and this book is THE BOOK for PHP. Having said that, I need to add that this is not a book intended for the beginner. It is intended for people already working in PHP 4 to upgrade their skills up to PHP 5. It is written by the people largely responsible for bringing PHP to the state it is today. They know whereof they speak. To be sure there are chapters at the beginning of the book that provide a basic introduction, but they are a bit terse when compared to the typical beginners level book.

So what are the new features that this book is particularly designed to cover: The basic underlying structure of the language has been changed for more object orientation. This fits into the concepts of more recently designed languages. Yes, Martha, PHP is definitely a language. The next most important part of the upgrade is greatly improved support for producing and parsing XML code. While there are many more changes, these are the major.

One of the authors of the book, Stig Bakken, is the creator of PEAR (PHP Extension and Application Repository). There are three chapters discussing PEAR. PEAR is itself a fairly complex language, so this serves as an introduction to give you enough information to know if this is for you.

Summary: An excellent book for the intermediate level PHP programmer who wants to move up. A bit imposing for a beginner.

Rating:
Summary: In-Depth PHP 5 Knowledge for the Already Initiated
Review: OK, so you've created your first web page with PHP and MySQL and it's all right--it does what you want--but you want something more. Something in there is lacking. You've been searching for the best way to get your object-oriented applications working properly, or you need to find a better way to assimilate your data graphically for your boss and the only computer technology he understands is the World Wide Web. Welcome to the world of power programming with the latest version of PHP.

One of the latest books in the Prentice Hall's Bruce Perens' Open Source Series is this one called "PHP 5 Power Programming." Written by Andi Gutmans, the lead PHP 5 designer, Stig Saether Bakken, the creator of PEAR, and Derick Rethans, a key PHP contributor, this book is a self-proclaimed tome of wonders which contains insights into all the key features of the latest version of PHP and the keys to unlocking all its wholesome goodness.

After spending a little time showing the evolution of PHP, the authors dive right in. They only devote a brief introduction to the basics of PHP. Clearly, if all you've done is convert a six-line BASH script into PHP, you might check out a less involved reference first. You're expected to be tired with the PHP basics already when you dive into this work, because it's barely a chapter gone before you start getting involved in advanced constructs like iterators, object polymorphism, overloading and exception handling. The best part is the authors never leave you floundering about a simple topic just because they're in the midst of a complicated one. They never let you forget how to unset a cookie, while explaining all of the safeguards necessary to maintain a safe operating environment for a published Web application.

Some of the topics that can be found in this very involved book are: stucturing and designing Web applications, integration with MySQL for data storage and recovery, working with the GD libraries for extensive graphical manipulation, and a detailed discussion and reference on PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository, which does for PHP what CPAN does for Perl. There are also sections with great insite into using PHP with XML and SOAP, regular expressions and streams. And there's even a detailed chapter towards the back about benchmarking your PHP performance and enhancing its operation. Three appendices provide information on the packages available through PEAR and PECL, the phpDocumentor application and Zend Studio.

For a technical manual, this book is surprisingly well laid out. You can use the index in the back to find the topic of your interest, but just skimming through reveals that everything is put where you can find it. Reading the book cover to cover works well also. I doubt the average reader will skip over much as this reference is chock full of good information and written with a style that keeps the reader interested, even if it's a topic he might already be familiar with.

For anyone who already has the fundamentals of PHP in pocket, but wants to get into the nuts and bolts of the new version and explore all of the depth and richness of some of its advanced features, this book is definitely a keeper. At 689 pages, it's long enough to contain a treasure trove of information, but short enough not to turn anyone away by its sheer volume. The best part is, all of this information is straight from the guys who know it best, so you can be sure that all of the best tips are included. And by the end of the book it's clear that PHP has evolved a great deal more robustness than it's original title and function of hypertext preprocessor had likely ever imagined.

Rating:
Summary: Solid and valuable, but terse in style
Review: Reasonably experience web or PHP engineers will like this book. The PHP language introduction at the beginning is a brief seventy pages which sets the tone for the rest of the book; fast and concise.

After the first three chapters that introduce PHP there is an excellent chapter on design patterns. From there he heads into PHP application design in another solid chapter that effectively mixes code and illustrations to demonstrate best practices.

I found some fault in the database chapter that follows. He shows the use of string substitution in building SQL queries. This is never ever a good idea because the database access is slow and more importantly, vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. He fixes it though by showing proper use of replacement operators with the section on PEAR.

The heart of the book, which I believe is the first seven chapters, finishes of with a strong chapter on exception handling. The chapters that follow cover XML, regular expressions, file I/O, and graphics. The regular expressions chapter is very good.

There are chapters on installing and configuring PHP and PEAR. There is also a very good chapter on extending PHP with C.

In the appendices are some reference sections. In particular there is a listing of PEAR modules that is handy, but not particularly well organized. I would have much rather have had the modules organized into groups of related technologies.

There is room for improvement. There could be more illustrations, and the text could use some more exposition. But this is a solid book that will be valuable for PHP programmers looking to flesh out their knowledge of the platform.

Rating:
Summary: nice coverage
Review: So why is PHP so popular? Here, the authors demonstrate strongly why this is so, using the latest version, PHP 5. The book walks through a full explanation of the syntax. If you already know C++, Java or C#, things will be very straightforward.

Though, strangely, PHP is deficient in some simple aspects. For example, imagine you have a for loop. The syntax of this is essentially the same as in the other languages. But any loop invariant is recomputed in each pass of the loop. Whereas those languages would implicitly precompute it. In PHP you have to explicitly precompute it into a temporary variable, and then use that variable in the for. Why PHP has this constraint is not explained in the book. But at least you get the workaround.

Most of the book covers using PHP in common applications. Especially in making a website with MySQL for the back end database. There are several books devoted to just this combination. But this book gives you enough to implement a good first case of it.