Coding errors could be quite a pain for beginners!

I have spend about a week with this book. I was quite pleased with the material, which were to the point nothing garbage and you can quickly go down the road but well after i stumbled across some code defects, i came here to amazon to see what is the story.

So yes while the book can be very useful. It has not been quite proofread (rather not at all). It seems it was upgraded from version 4 (my guess) without doing any work.

For example I just spend about 3 hours and possibly more to read a record with encrypted password (chap 11) and it did not work. I was following everything according to the book so you can see how frustrated one can be. Online help did not help much so i was stuck.

After browsing for quite a while, I found that the password field in the book was stored in 20 char (varchar(20)). When the password was encrypted and stored, it was converted to 41 char (or so) hence part of it was lost. Now when you retrieve this password, it will never work. So I finally changed the password field to 50 and everything worked fine then. Now this is just one big. In chapter 11 i found 2 more serious bugs, the code were not working (and is still not working). So i will not recommend a beginner to go through this book esp chapter 11. It will almost make you sweet! I really spent quite a lot of my time just to fix the bugs. The material is good though and track is good too. But I would recommend it only for reading and just for basic beginning programming. The code needs some serious work! You probably are better off with another book. I am glad i got it from library, it is not my own :)

I guess i can't change the stars but deserves 2 or 2.5 not 3.

Other Reviews

• Perfect book to start PHP
• Coding errors could be quite a pain for beginners!
• Helpful for the beginner, but watch out for typos
• This book was not proofread!!!
• Sloppy