reviewed by: Peter deHaan

Version: PHP 4.1

Publisher: Sybex

Before commenting on the book, I'll give you a brief overview of my web experience. I have been a web programmer for about 5 years now and have been a ColdFusion programmer. This is one of the first PHP books I've read and my PHP skills are quite limited so I'm approaching this book from a very beginner level of PHP. With that out of the way, on to the book!

Much like most other web programming books, I skipped the first chapter as it is a brief overview of how the internet works and mandatory figures of a bunch of computers and servers with arrows pointing in every which direction. Chapter 1 gives a brief overview of commenting your code, differences between GET and POST and URL encoding values. If you have any previous web programming experience this doesn't really offer anything outlandishly new and you can probably quickly skim this section.

The next chapter, Chapter 2 "Variables", gives a very good walkthrough of Booleans, integers, floating point numbers, strings, arrays and associative arrays. There is also a good section which gives a quick overview of "classes", which allow you to build an object oriented application. Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is covered (and quite well at that) in more detail later in Chapter 6 "Object-Oriented Programming".

When reading this book, I found everything to be well written and what I'd expect from a web programming book. There were the typical chapters on variables, operators and expressions, flow control, strings and arrays. That isn't to say the entire book is just a cookie cutter version of every other book you've read, this book does offer some really well written sections. For example, Chapter 7 "Debugging and Errors" was outstanding and well covered. I find most books don't really cover this topic enough or cover the subject adequately, but this book did an excellent job.

The next chapter, Chapter 8 "SQL and Database Interaction" was also very well covered. It covers topics such as "primary keys", "normalization", "relationships" and relational database management systems. Even if you are familiar with all these previous terms it is a good chapter to quickly skim the section and familiarize yourself with the topics. The chapter continues and covers the basics of SQL and the major keywords, and finally finishes off with a walkthrough of how to use PHP with MySQL, PostgreSQL and "Pear Database Abstraction".

Everything I read in this book, from "Data Validation" to "Security" to "XML and XHTML" to the excellent chapter on creating PDF documents with PHP was well written and easy to follow. The final chapter, Chapter 19 "E-Mail" walks you through how to send emails, access emails using POP and IMAP as well as shows you how to build a simple webmail client.

Would I recommend this book to anybody learning PHP? Definitely. I found this book very well written and very clear and it covered everything that I've needed so far to build my beginner applications. I don't doubt that as I become a better PHP programmer that this book will continue to answer all my questions and be sitting right near my desk.

Rating: (5/5).