PHP 5 in practice
So, as you probably know, I have had my PHP Developer cap on at work for a while now and I have been loving it. As a refresher to moving from design to development I built a small and simple MVC framework which I have implemented on a project I’m working on, which definitely helped me to get back into code. However, I know that I am still not hitting the bar, so I recently purchased a book titled “PHP 5 in practice“.
This book is written by Jonathan D. Eisenhamer (Space Telescope Science Institute) and Elliot White III (Senior developer at digg.com) and focuses very much on using PHP in real situations. In fact, rather than going through the different aspects of PHP like scalar variables, functions, methods, etc and showing examples to illustrate, the book feels much more like they’ve written examples based around real-life, which lead into explanations of the PHP code being used.
I really like this style of book, it’s a very interesting and understandable read, which I will no-doubt go back to for reference time and time again. It does take you through constants, integers, strings, arrays, functions, methods, objects & classes, etc like any good programming-language book should, but it reveals so much more about how to USE the language than other books I’ve read.
I do have one major problem with this book though; When I was surfing around Amazon, which led me to discovering “PHP 5 in practice”, I was in-fact looking for a book that would introduce me properly to the NEW aspects of version 5. The blurb indicated that this was for advanced programmers and would point out the new-found power in the latest release of PHP.
However, I really don’t think it makes clear what is new in PHP 5 and what was available in PHP 4 (which I am already very familiar with). Objects and Classes were/are of particular interest to me, which the book does devote a whole chapter on, but not nearly as much information as I would have liked.
Other than that, the book is excellent. I would personally say that this book is for people who have toyed with PHP, but really need some practical examples of how the language is used. If I were to rate it I’d probably give it a 4.5 out of 5, but due to a number of pretty obvious spelling a grammar mistakes; 4 out of 5 is a fair figure.
P.S. Don’t you reckon that PHP should have a logo more like this one??? Seriously, the current one looks terrible…
