Short lived Expectations

If you are like me you will be influenced to purchase this book mainly on the reputation of the publisher - O'Reilly. The rest of the decision making could be the customers' reviews and maybe based on the amazon's "Look Inside" feature.

So before purchasing the book I did a quick scanning of the index and TOC I left with the impression that this book will be kind of the books of "in a nutshell " category. But after receiving the book I tried to use it as I planned to - as a blog style feature exposer, if you wish authors' rants on the matter. In other words I expected all major features to be concisely described and put to practice by authors' grasp of the subject. I guess that was also authors' intention, but the delivery of it by my opinion didn't hold it.

They did some useful categorization of the core functions, but a lot of space is wasted by merely repeating facts, which can be found on the Internet, and which is also suggested by the authors. That disclaimer by the authors alone made the life of the book to be shortened dramatically. The rest of the book, before the reference guide (Appendix A) could be found in better explanations from other books, which even don't have this ambitious subject matter and still can deliver better job (cf. book by David Powers, Luke Welling, etc.).

In the final analysis this book was a disappointment for me, even though published by O'Reilly. And because of it short life the fate of the book will be early retirement to the recycling factory.

Other Reviews

• Short lived Expectations
• Good Book
• Too Much PHP4 to be useful these days
• Well Written Book
• Good for reference