| Welcome to vBulletin FAQ |
vBulletin FAQ Navigation
Getting Started
Customizing your vBulletin
Search Engines & SEO
Making Money with a Forum
Promoting your Community
|
| Get your own vBulletin Today |
|
| Webmaster Help |
|
|
|
PHP in a Nutshell (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly))
vBulletin Book Store > vBulletin books beginning with P
|
PHP in a Nutshell (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)) |
Author: Paul Hudson
Published: 2005-10-13 |
List price: $29.95
Our price: $19.77
|
Usually ships in 24 hours
As of: July 04th, 2008 01:16:16 PM
|
|
|
Customer comments on this selection.
 Not a Nutshell Book
The O'Reilly "in a Nuthsell" series is the best reference to standard libraries and language features available. PHP in a Nutshell sullies the name, however, with what amounts to an introductory survey in the course and little, if any, analysis of standard libraries. Certain tips, such as those on flash and pdf handling are interesting, but irrelevant to most programmers. This goes doubly for the discussion of PHP's 2D drawing API; it seems as though the authors decided they would provide a schizophrenic volume which is on the one hand a beginner's tutorial and on the other hand a survey of the more esoteric, unused portions of the language.
 Good review material but many errors
I am pretty familiar with PHP and worked with it some time ago, but I needed a book to quickly refresh my knowledge of it for a project, and this book did a pretty good job of that. It gets to the point on the right topics (including chapters on OOP, Cookies and Sessions, and Databases) and has a short, useful function reference instead of listing every function under the sun.
Nonetheless, there are many errors both in the code and in the writing. If you don't have a solid foundation in PHP and programming, these errors can really throw you off. Sometimes I would get confused as I tried to figure out why a line of code does what the author says it does only to realize it was an error that made it into print. If the editing had been better and caught these errors, the book would have received a four-star rating from me.
Bottom line, if you know PHP and need a good reference book or a book to quickly review concepts and functions, this book is for you. Don't buy this book if you are new to PHP.
 excellent writing
I bought this book after studying PHP with the author's online tutorials. They covered quite a bit of what was in the book but I enjoyed the online version so much, I decided to thank him for putting a free online version out on the net by buying his book. In addition, I like to have the hard copy for a reference. Excellently written and one of the clearest and easiest programming books I've every read. It is also one of the few programming books I have read without any programming errors in it.
Decent broad coverage of many PHP basics
A decent broad coverage of many PHP basics but I didn't really learn much more than I had found on my own by randomly poking around in the online PHP manual every time I needed a function to get a job done. I was hoping that reading a book like this from cover to cover would expose some parts of PHP I missed or teach some techniques and best practice that I didn't figure out myself. Unfortunately it did not.
For someone who known no PHP at all (and no C) I would give that a 4 star rating. But every PHP programmer has access to great free online PHP manual so I think this book has less value. And anyone who knows C can start programming PHP right away without reading much of anything. I assume the average programmer knows some C or Java and can read the online PHP manual. For those people, this book is no better than 3.
Well done and to the point.
Doesn't waste my time with how to run an editor and doesn't assume I know too much, either. The examples are concise.
This book works well as a handbook and as a text. Highly recommended!
|
Similar Listings
|
|
Our vBulletin book picks:
|
|
Find more vBulletin related products of interest.
|
