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PHP 5 Unleashed Review by Oxoned
Confusing presentation of sessions
I have another "unleashed" book and was very happy with it, so immediately picked up this book when needing to work with PHP. What I needed to learn about was session usage.
Unfortunately, this book is not very good for that, for a novice learning to use sessions. The reason why is not because it is too advanced--I'm adept at reading computer textbooks and parsing the info--the problem is that it is a best practice in terms of security to turn register_globals off in PHP, that is the standard config for PHP after 4.1, and yet they provide all of their examples with this being enabled.
They even mention that it isn't best practice, but they go ahead and do it anyway with an occasional caveat here and there for those who are not using it. What that means is that somebody in my position is not only trying to understand the code, but also accound for everything that doesn't apply to me. I have to translate, then interpret. Why should I have to do all that for basic "best practice" functionality?!
I've since picked up other books (PHP 5 recipes, Wicked cool PHP) that are much better. I gave this book the stars it has because it is very informative and useful. In the case of sessions, it is just very confusing.