Learning PHP 5

by David Sklar, Nathan Torkington (Editor), Tatiana Diaz (Editor)

PHP has gained a following among non-technical web designers who need to add interactive aspects to their sites. Offering a gentle learning curve, PHP is an accessible yet powerful language for creating dynamic web pages. As its popularity has grown, PHP's basic feature set has become increasingly more sophisticated. Now PHP 5 boasts advanced features--such as new object-oriented capabilities and support for XML and Web Services--that will please even the most experienced web professionals while still remaining user-friendly enough for those with a lower tolerance for technical jargon. If you've wanted to try your hand at PHP but haven't known where to start, then Learning PHP 5 is the book you need. If you've wanted to try your hand at PHP but haven't known where to start, then Learning PHP 5 is the book you need. With attention to both PHP 4 and the new PHP version 5, it provides everything from a explanation of how PHP works with your web server and web browser to the ins and outs of working with databases and HTML forms. Written by the co-author of the popular PHP Cookbook , this book is for intelligent (but not necessarily highly-technical) readers. Learning PHP 5 guides you through every aspect of the language you'll need to master for professional web programming results. This book provides a hands-on learning experience complete with exercises to make sure the lessons stick. Learning PHP 5 covers the following topics, and Written by David Sklar, coauthor of the PHP Cookbook and an instructor in PHP, this book offers the ideal classroom learning experience whether you're in a classroom or on your own. From learning how to install PHP to designing database-backed web applications, Learning PHP 5 will guide you through every aspect of the language you'll need to master to achieve professional web programming results.

Genres: Nonfiction, Programming, Reference, Computers, Textbooks, Technology, Internet

368 pages, Paperback

First published June 25, 2004

About the author

David Sklar, MD is the author of “La Clinica,” a memoir of his experience as a volunteer in a rural Mexican clinic and “Atlas of Men,” an award-winning novel about a secret research project. He is an emergency physician, professor at Arizona State University and medical researcher who has authored or co-authored more than 200 articles about medical education, emergency health care, and global health. He is former editor-in-chief of Academic Medicine, the leading medical education journal in the US. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona. To learn more about his life and work, visit www.davidpsklar.com.

Reviews

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great introduction to PHP. The book is well written and has many great examples. The book also includes plenty of exercises to do with solutions.

[Elliott Bignell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first foray into PHP in the hope of engineering a change of career-direction, so it is a bit hard to review the O'Reilly book without also reviewing PHP. I've elected not to try too hard, Instead, I will start with the book and try to keep my impressions of the language for the end.

O'Reilly are probably my favourite software textbooks and this one delivers yet again. The prose is clear, the structure is clear and progressive, there are plenty of examples and there are exercises. I rapidly learned plenty about the language and its use that I had not picked up by just surfing for solutions to toy-programming experiments. There is plenty on designing secure web-sites, for instance, embedded in the course of the text that I would not have thought to look for until after finding it in this book.

PHP itself is a mixed bag. It is quite powerful, with support for object-oriented, procedural and functional paradigms, built-in regular expression handling, associative arrays, plenitude of libraries and a C-influenced syntax that mainly suits my taste as a C++ geek. On the other hand, its acceptance out-of-the-box of undeclared variables, the capacity to assign a different type to an existing variable and just have it mutate without warning and a few niggles like the indentation of HEREDOC fragments make me want to tear my hair out. It's also not trivially obvious how to debug it, and the book does not really provide a production-grade solution. I've loaded some VIM plug-ins to check syntax and declarations and so on, and I will be reading a couple more of the O'Reilly books on the subject.

Worth reading if you are thinking of moving into PHP, but I kind-of wish there were a better-designed language to do the job!

[Damon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know much about web programming and I have a bit of a dread of HTML, so I thought that the server side might be more for me. This was a good introduction to PHP, and I think that I understand it fairly well. A major downside was that this book doesn't really explain the structure of the language syntax. It's based on C, so much of it made sense because I've used CSharp and a bit of C++ but others didn't. So db::connect syntax was described but not explained. Likewise, PHP5 can be used as a functional or object oriented language, but there was very little space dedicated to the merits, issues between the two. Also, and I don't know if this is because PHP is a collaboratively developed language, because it's loosely typed and therefore not a prescriptive as other languages I've used, but the underlying principles and structures of PHP just seem a little vague to me. For example, in object oriented PHP objects of the same type can access each others' private fields...erm, what?! That just seems completely non-sensical to me.

I guess if I don't like this then I'm really gonna hate javascript and html...

[Beyond9K · Rating 4 out of 5]

good book for someone fairly new to php, it provides a scope of what you can do with the language. I don't think it would be too helpful for someone who already has a good understanding of other programming languages., but overall good quick read

[Drew Pyke · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a shining example of how a programming book should look and feel for beginners. I would've liked more focus on object orientated programming since that is the main benefit of 5 over previous versions, but as a beginner at the time the entire book was perfect.

[Brandee Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the books by Skylar and this is no exception. He writes books that are easy to understand and extremely helpful.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perfect if you haven't done any (or just a little) programming before and want to learn php. Otherwise, skip it. You will find it too basic.

[Gabriel Rolland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un buon ripasso per chi gi�� conosce il PHP, un ottimo inizio per chi invece non lo conosce.