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PHP Book :
PHP Developer's Cookbook (2nd Edition)
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PHP Developer's Cookbook (2nd Edition)
by Sterling Hughes, Andrei Zmievski
Paperback: 504 pages
Dimensions (in inches): 1.16 x 9.08 x 7.42
Publisher: Sams
ISBN: 0672323257; 2nd edition (December 13, 2001)
This task-based reference offers developers solutions to common problems they might encounter. Each solution provides complete code listings along with an explanation of how and why a particular solution was used. Chapters include dates and times, associative arrays, file access, directories, functions, web automation, DBM databases, interfacing with other languages, email, the LDAP and SNMP protocols, image creation, and the Zend API.
Task-based reference, delivering solutions to common problems with the HTML-embedded scripting language, PHP. Each solution includes complete code listings and an in-depth explanation of how and why that solution fit the problem. Help for professionals troubleshooting the creation of dynamically generated Web pages.
From the Back Cover: PHP Developer's Cookbook is a task-oriented book intended to offer solutions to the daily problems and goals the PHP developer faces.
In addition to a brief introduction to PHP, the main content of the book is presented in a problem and solution format, logically organized on a topic-by-topic basis. Each question specifies a goal, and the following text provides a detailed solution that achieves the stated goal along with any additional related information. After a crash course in the basics, the PHP Developer's Cookbook covers more advanced development topics.
About the Author: Sterling Hughes is a freelance Web developer, creating dynamic Web applications in PHP, C, and Perl for Fortune 500 companies. He is a coauthor of the PHP documentation and has written articles about PHP for Webreference, Zend, and Webtechniques. He currently writes a regular feature for Zend. He authored PHP's SWF, CURL, Sablotron (XSL), and BZip2 extensions, and coauthored the Sockets extension. He can be reached at sterling@php.net.
Andrei Zmievski is the lead development engineer and open source researcher at ispi, where he works on various e-commerce and Web publishing projects. He is a member of the PHP core development group and has contributed to several other open source projects. His other interests include piano and computer graphics. He can be reached at andrei@php.net.
Customer Reviews
Reviewer: John Asendorf from Granville, OH USA
Having used PHP for about 2 years now, I was fairly comfortable with the language and originally bought the book because I saw Sterling at the PHP Conference and liked his attitude so I thought I'd buy his book. The approach of this book is far different from most of those lofty, heady books with their $foo after $foobar examples of basically useless coding ideas. Sterling takes real life needs and cooks them up with short, useable snippets of code. He says in the opening that, "This book is meant [to used over and over as a daily reference for problem solving]." Well, Sterling, you hit the mark. Another nice thing was that I started finding functions that I didn't even know existed and then started imagining uses for them to solve problems I hadn't thought of as problems!
There is only one shortcoming to this book (with the exception of Julie Meloni becoming Julie "Melon" in the opening section :P), the lack of source code availability. If you want to see the samples in action and play with them, start typing. That's not too bad for most of the 10-30 line snippets, but for things like the basic search-engine code, it's quite tedious. I OCR'd it... but not everyone has that ability. Hopefully SAMS will either get him a CD to include in his book next time or set up some web space for us to grab it.
Reviewer: cdbaby from Portland, OR USA
UNLIKE ANY OTHER PHP BOOK. I write that in all caps because I can't emphasize this enough: this is NOT a typical "let's show you PHP" book. There is no walk-from-beginning-to-end introduction. PHP Developer's Cookbook is for INTERMEDIATE/ADVANCED users that have already had their introduction, already used PHP for a while, and find themselves, while working on a project, saying, "How do you validate an email address?" or "How do we save sessions in a database?"
This is a book of PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS, broken into little categories for easy reference. (Look at the table of contents.) Of course you could go through it from start to finish and learn quite a bit, even if you're not working on a big project yet. All that being said, THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST VALUABLE PHP BOOKS I'VE EVER SEEN, and I've seen them all. It's the only one I'm going to keep on my desk now as I work. It's exactly what I was looking for. (I work on PHP projects all day, and am constantly searching the mailing lists to remember how to create drop-down-menus, how to process individual words in a text file, etc. This book has it all!)
Combine this with the new feature on www.php.net that lets you type "www.php.net/functionname" to immediately look up the manual page for every PHP function, and you're all set! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Reviewer: A reader from Kessel-Lo, Vlaams Brabant Belgium
Not for beginners but excellent for someone who knows the basics of php! Best php book I ever bought, real value for money.
Reviewer: Ehsanul Karim from Dhaka,Bangladesh
This book takes PHP to the depth and reveals many of the methods and functions which can be only found out after years of extensive programming.The topics are very well organized. If you are looking forward to learn PHP grab this book.Although if you are looking for database sychronizations this book doesn't cover a lot.If you are looking for a PHP book other than Database applications this is the right one !!
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