PHP 6/MySQL Programming for the Absolute Beginner

J. Rice

Saturday, 20th March 2010 at 12:02

 

Just the book I was looking for. Great price and fast shipping. What more could you ask for? It even came with the CD/DVD and I’ve tried using it and it works 100% fine. Thanks!
Rating: 5 / 5

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Cliff Lyles

Saturday, 20th March 2010 at 14:55

 

I’ll admit, I haven’t even made it through the first chapter yet. I have high hopes for this book, but the Amazon description left out one crucial detail: you need to REALLY know your XHTML 1.0 strict before hoping to handle PHP. The book makes this very statement on page 3. That would have been really nice to know before I bought the book, since I don’t know the first thing about XHTML. Guess if I’m going to get my money out of this, I’ll have to buy a book on XHTML first! >:/
Rating: 3 / 5

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Robert

Saturday, 20th March 2010 at 16:00

 

I am giving this two stars because this is actually not a good book for beginners but really a book for more intermediate PHP users or those programmers interested in gaming development. It suffers from too much reliance on arcane examples plus a first couple of chapters that really provide more frustration than value to a real beginner.

Chapter one actually does nothing to really help you set up a php server. The book assumes that you know a good deal about local server technology and that you are comfortable setting up a local server on your machine. It assumes that you know the subtleties of how a local host file system works. It also assumes extensive experience in static web page development xhtml coding, CSS, etc.

In chapter two the book jumps from being very basic to using some advanced tools as examples. The concepts used require that you spend some extremely careful time reading the provided code used in the examples to understand the relevance of specific functions. The examples are interesting but are not directly applicable to a beginner.

In chapter 3 the book becomes a reasonable teaching tool yet its reliance on dice games as examples makes it somewhat irrelevant for what most users are studying this to do on the web. It does provide the new programmer, and even more experienced ones, with some foundation of how php code works but not in a web related context. It does develop good practices and explains how and why the programming works. It explains very well the differences in control structures, and where one shines over another. It makes arrays accessible but not friendly and provides a basic introduction into MySQL. With very careful study you can probably actually put all of it into practical applications but many times you will be left cold when applying it to more day to day web applications.

My advice is if you already have this book then use it as an auxiliary in conjunction with another book that will give you a more grounded perspective without so detailed reliance on complex game type examples. My personal recommendation is “PHP Visual Quick Start Guide Third Edition” by Larry Ullman. This is a real beginners book that actually teaches and will have you proficient in PHP in no time.

Rating: 2 / 5

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