It Gets The Job Done, But It's Nothing Special

If you've been programming for a while, the pace of this book is too slow to read cover to cover. The best thing to do is read the first half of the book (through chapter 9) and then skip around to what interests you. As others have mentioned, you will have to modify the code in the examples to get them to work because of the use of globals. This is not impossible to overcome if you write the message board for the book at http://p2p.wrox.com. However, it is annoying. There are other errors too, but it doesn't take much in the way of trial and error to get around them. The three chapters on MySQL are the most useful. If you've worked with databases in other scripting languages, e.g. Perl, Python, or Ruby, it's simply a matter of looking up what you want to do. There are some good style examples on structuring PHP code - use of an "$action" variable to drive the behavior of the site from a single page. The book also stresses putting reusable code in include files. The author dismisses classes/objects as not really being useful in PHP, but the use of classes elimates the need for the "global" declarations in many of the common include files. All in all, this is an adequate book, but noting profound. If you have programming experience, this book will get you up and running quickly.

Other Reviews

• I went from Zero to Expert and this book was a big help
• It Gets The Job Done, But It's Nothing Special
• Warning: error in most code
• Dissapointingly inconsistent book