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PHP Cookbook Review by Darkness' Ally
Hit AND Miss
I've owned this book for about 2 years, my PhP coding experience being intermediate both before AND after reading it. It is by no means a lesson book, as implied by another person's review, but instead follows the term "cookbook" very well. A quick explanation of my review's title: "Hit AND Miss". It's mostly "hit" but there are a few aspects that left me feeling as though I was lacking in level of knowledge, something also expressed in another person's review, concerning the book's contents.
For one, for up to intermediate small issues it definitely hits the mark. The code snippets are (mostly) well-commented or explained in the surrounding paragraphs, as well as (from what I can tell) easy on server load. Some are (of course) more processor-intense than others, but that's the nature of any programming/scripting language: some stuff's simple and quick and other stuff is just downright tedious to type-out and (possibly) can become a thorn in the Server's side (forgive my pun).
The book's Problem-into-Solution format is very easy to follow, almost identical to a Q&A format. The table of contents in the book alone is far more extensive than I would ever expect from a book of this size, and it is definitely a wealth of knowledge, technique and guidelines up to a certain point.
If I had to pick one thing to complain about it would have to be some of the solutions themselves. My other complaints are nothing compared to this one. The following is based on my own personal preference and server settings/extensions, so if you have PEAR and like using it (most people do, it seems), then disregard the following.
A bunch of solutions are explained using PEAR. It's been so long since I've read up on PEAR that I've no clue of what it stands for or even if you have to install it a certain way. Be that as it may, I choose not to use frameworks of any kind most of the time. PEAR is at the top of my "do not use" list. I've seen what it can do, and I think it's great, but I want to get my hands dirty, and PEAR can really take that away. Back to it: the PEAR-based solutions more often than not come with no alternative solution. There is one I remember concerning pagination where it gives the pure-PEAR way and an alternative. However the alternative involves other PEAR extensions. The alternative is an alternative to only PEAR's "DB_Pager" class, and not a full alternative. One would need to know what the PEAR was doing (have PEAR) and alter the code to keep it PEAR-free if one were in my shoes. I've since been able to adapt it, it wasn't hard. But there are beginners out there who have poor skills at transposing (correct word?) code from classes or frameworks into something completely customized. When I started out it was the OREILLY PHP Cookbook and the OREILLY Learning PHP & MySQL books I started with, along with some guitar books for learning Christmas songs (I know, unrelated, same box though :P).
All-in-all the book is worth the price. The pros outweigh the cons almost 3 to 1. I still use this book to refresh my memory of techniques long since forgotten or fuzzy, even 2 years after I've purchased more advanced books that cover most of the same things in greater detail and moulded for greater scale. PHP as many know is very unforgiving when it comes to screw-ups, and the little things that you forget can make or break a script. I'll be keeping this book for years and years to come to dust off and refresh my memory. My website is still lacking, but heck, it's a personal website, and wouldn't be nearly as good (??? :P) as it is now without the "cookbook".