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If last month's Online piece on PHP piqued your interest and you want more than the online manual can provide, Professional PHP Programming is a good place to start. This book is huge, heavyweight but not heavy reading. There are three main parts. The first 550 pages work through the various aspects of PHP, explaining the syntax and techniques used. There are plenty of examples, in some cases the same example is reused in subsequent chapters, gradually adding to its functionality.
The next part covers four case studies. These are complete applications, explained in detail: a shopping cart, a web based discussion forum, a web e-mail interface and a database. Most of these are real applications in current use. Each is covered from concept to execution, covering the design decisions as well as the PHP scripting.
The final part is a set of reference appendices, including a complete PHP command listing, broken down into sections. Because the listing is not alphabetical, it can be hard to find the listing for a particular command quickly. The book has a comprehensive index, but only refers to the page where a command is discussed, not the appendix page that also covers it. This is an oversight in an otherwise well laid out book.
Professional PHP Programming is a well-written book that fulfils the roles of tutorial and reference, although it assumes that you have some prior experience of script programming. The examples used throughout can be downloaded from the publisher's web site. Oh, if only we could have done that in the days of the C64 and Spectrum magazines.
Originally reviewed in issue 14
by Neil Bothwick.
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