OK for my needs

-- but I don't have the needs that a serious PHP programmer does. All the basics seem to be here, in the form of examples. An experienced programmer can skip over the bumpy parts and fill in the blanks.

And there are lots of blanks. Boolean operators are introduced on page 60, including both bitwise and short-circuit OR operators. It gives an example of short-circuit behavior, but never really explains what that means. (If you never heard the term, "a OR b" in the short-circuit sense means "if a is true the expression as a whole is already true, so don't even evaluate expression b", and don't create all the output and side effects that b would have created.) Likewise, p.216 shows a use of include() that doesn't mean what you probably want, but fails to explain why incorrect usage is incorrect. Escape tag configuration is set on p.20, but there never is a clear description of how escape tags interact with the code. The section on Javascript gives examples of files with that and PHP together, but never really spells out the source-level interactions between them.

Also, there is only a little mention of some of the peculiar capabilities of an interpreted language, like being able to use character strings as variable names. This borders on (and sometimes blurs the line with) self-modifying code. There's a lot of potential power there, but you're on your own if you try to tame it.

On the whole, the book gave a uniform impression. It sounds like a pretty good explanation of material that the author just barely understands. There's plenty of code-by-example material here, so I can probably get everything done that I need to. Someone who really needed to understand the language in finest detail would not get what they want, however.

//wiredweird

Other Reviews

• Decent content; too many typos/ambiguities. Unclear who the audience is.
• OK for my needs
• Lots of errors
• 3 thumbs up
• Somewhat misleading title, but the book is still great