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 Recently I decided to try PHP for a little task, involving forms, file scanning with regexp, and other basic things. Although I've scanned numerous online PHP guides before, I wasn't sure how to do this, so I went to the local computer store and scanned the PHP titles. Many books filled those shelves, and I had little time to scan them. But then I spied a peachpit book on the topic, and since I've found them helpful (and inexpensive) before, I picked it up without even scanning it.This was Larry Ullman's book. Within minutes I had a basic idea how to do what I wanted, and within an hour I had code working. Now, some of this is just that php is a good language -- and a familiar one, to Perl users like myself -- but part of it is that Ullman has crafted a fine little book, easy to navigate and easy to digest. Like all Peachpit books, this is aimed at beginners. And, like most computer books, the details matter less than the framework. I gather, from other reviews I've seen on Amazon, that this book suffers some errors, e.g. in a discussion of prime numbers. I'm not sure I care, or that others should care. This is because I can't imagine reading this book (or any computer guide) from cover to cover, studying the details. Rather, readers do what I did. I needed to know how to open and read a file, so I looked in the table of contents and flipped to a page stating clearly how to do that. Ten seconds of scanning, plus a minute of study, and I was back to my text editor, typing in code. Ditto on the use of regular expressions (which is done in an odd non-perlish way in PHP). Did I read all the details of regular expressions? Lord, no. I just found the name of the subroutine, checked whether the search string or the pattern goes first, and I was back to my coding. This is the essence of computer books of this ilk. The _defining_ textbook should be very clear, very detailed, and very accurate. (Think of Kernighan and Ritchie for the C language.) But a quick-start guide is not meant to be studied labouriously. It is meant to be flipped through one evening, and then put beside the terminal the next day. Finding information should be quick, and digesting it should require scanning only a page or so. In these regards, Ullman's book shines. Another factor is cost. This book was about 1/3 of the competitors in my local store. One should admit that these books are really throwaway items anyway, since once you get familiar you'll go to online resources of the latest developments. This might argue that cost is significant, and that the best scheme is to buy a cheap and digestable guide to get started, switching to online resources once you've reached your stride. In a nutshell, this is what I like about Peachpit books, Ullman's being no exception. The bottom line is that it got me coding in a few minutes, really, within the time it took me to write these words!
The main reason I give this only 4 out of 5 is that after reading this book, I thought I was ready to make decent PHP pages, but I was not. The lessons I learned were so Basic, but the author does not hide from this fact. It's certainly a GREAT entry Level book (if not a must for entry level PHP coders). But this book is far from enough. Take what you learn in this book, and apply it to what slightly more advanced books will teach you.
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I have picked up "PHP for the World Wide Web Visual Quickstart Guide by Larry Ullman" and love the book. From reading his easy to follow hands on examples in the book I taught myself PHP and mySQL in 3 days. His book was very informative and enabled me to redo my entire site in PHP. I have emailed the author on different questions and problems and have received very helpful and informative replies. I would definately recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn PHP.
I just purchased this book and although it says it covers PHP3 & 4, it managed to leave out one minor detail which took me about 2 hours to figure out. Chapter 2 covers variables. While I have some programming background in ASP and JavaScript, I am new to PHP. I am aware of how variables work. This book referenced variables as $variable which isn't a problem for PHP4. However I am using PHP4.3.2 which defaults register_globals=Off. Variables cannot be reference in this manner. It took me a couple of hours surfing php.net and other resources to figure this out. One I made the change to register_globals=ON, the code in the book worked just fine with no errors. Needless to say, it has slowed my progress down a bit, but I am still pluggin my way through. I have one other PHP book, but it is geared toward Dreamweaver MX and requires almost no hand coding. In order to learn the language, I felt the need to learn to hand code first. So far this book lays it all out nicely. The tips are worth reading a second time. I just wish they had mentioned the register_globals bit. It would have saved me a few hours and got me to bed at a decent hour.
