PHP

After 2 years or so, I missed that feeling. I'd check out new PHP books and flip through every chapter saying, "Yeah yeah yeah...". I realized I had become an expert.

I was honestly impressed looking at the table of contents of this book. This is NOT your usual PHP book! That's obvious right away. So I ordered it. And it just arrived yesterday.

I was up all night reading it, and again today. This is the most amazing PHP book for experienced PHP programmers I've ever seen. (Wait - this is the ONLY book for experienced PHP programmers I've ever seen!)

The author really knows his stuff, and uses best-practices, throughout. Really well thought-out code with a lot to learn from.

The fact that it's all based on the new PHP5 style makes it even better! A great way to get to know the new object approach to PHP5: to see it in real-world examples, so that after a few hours with this book it's second-nature.

For the first time in three years, I feel wonderfully over-my-head with a LOT to learn here in this one amazing book. Thanks George!

The performance section for example (which is one of my favourites) just scratches the surface on how you can use APD to find bottlenecks in your code. George provides you with some common examples, but the real work is still yours, you won't get a step-by-step guide.

Another interesting point of this book is that it is not to read from start to the end. You will surely find sections you are already familiar with (Smarty being a prime example), or sections too advanced for you (ex. distributed environments). And George also takes the liberty to use PHP 5 OO code before introducing the new PHP 5 features, and using XML-RPC before the chapter on RPC calls.

I find it very valuable to have a lengthy introduction to good coding practices at the begining, since most of the code in the book builds heavily on having a consistent coding style. What I miss from the begining though is the introduction on where can people find details if they are stuck. There are interesting PHP.net services (lxr.php.net for example), which are quite valuable if you are trying to find something in the PHP source, to get an idea of how things work.

George having been heavily involved in the APC and APD development knows a lot about PHP and Zend internals. The last section provides you with a current and correct explanation on how you can extend PHP. None of the printed books on the market, or any online tutorial or manual can beat this section currently.

Go read the reviews of other PHP authors' blogs by doing a Feedster search of this book, you'll find that they highly recommend this book, sometimes over their own books!

Looking at the chapter list, you can see the topics covered are not what you see in a typical PHP book. In fact, if you don't know PHP, this is definitely not the book to be learning out of. If you don't know how to program, this is not the book to be learning out of. But if you use PHP professionally and need to get that extra mile or scale your PHP to a large site, then this is definitely the book to be buying.

There are simply no books, articles, or web references that provide a bird's eye view of the Zend Engine Internals. That is, until this book. The car analogy in this chapter is very apt for the potential reader of this book on a whole. If all you do is use PHP to get you from "point A to B" you certainly don't need this book. But if you are a PHP professional who is responsible for a high performance website, then you need to know the content of this book cold.

The chapter on Performance Tuning has a lot of gems you can't find in any other PHP reference and is essential knowledge when you use PHP on large sites. According to Michael Radwin, George's APD (the tool referenced in the chapter), is used to performance tune parts of Yahoo. But George also gives a nod to competing projects mentioning their strengths and weaknesses. (You can see why it's hard not to like the guy, his pragmatism supersedes his ego in every page.)

This neatly complements any other PHP book on the shelf (including any other "professional" PHP book). And I'll definitely have to give an updated review after I've read the other chapters.

I'm sure it will pay for itself many times over. Believe me, I speak from experience to know that George speaks from experience (he was involved in a PHP-based company that drove a company I worked for out of business).

(And to all of you who have received advanced copies... Grr!)

One pleasant surprise was that no one particular database is favored; in fact use of the database abstraction layer in PEAR is encouraged for code portability. I am encouraged by the use of PEAR in this book, as it can only help to bring the community together in its use and promote PEAR as a standard of sorts. The PEAR database abstraction layer is picked apart so that you may understand exactly how it works and be that much more efficient with using it.

At the end of this book, it offers two chapters dedicated to designing and implementing applications using a native XML database. The first of the two chapters concentrates on the fundamentals of native XML databases; what they are and how they work. The second chapter then presents a case study using Xindice.

I found this book to be very thorough and well put together. Cheers to Wrox for another fine book!

Open Source Web Development with LAMP is a very long title, but an absolutely killer book. LAMP is Linux (OS), Apache (web server) MySQL (database), Perl and PHP (scripting). This book also includes many languages not covered in other titles. I was particularly glad to see WML (Website Meta Language) which is useful for generating static pages through a robust programming construct. Static pages load faster and without any security concerns that you have with dynamic scripting languages like perl, php, embperl, or mason, all of which are covered extreemly well in this book.

I've been doing web development for about 8 years, which probably makes me pretty old in the business. I've seen the dynamic web content languages from infancy, but I've never seen a good way of learning them until now. OSWD w/ LAMP is absolutely fabulous.

I was one of the technical editors of this book, and was able to watch it evolve as they wrote. The authors have made a huge effort to make the book appropriate for multiple Linux distributions, and they have achieved the highest degree of technical accuracy.

OSWB covers many different technologies, some complementary, some discreet. By showing you many of the possible tools, this book lets you decide which is best for the job at hand.

The theory behind OSWB is that knowledge of 20% of a tool's capabilities will let you accomplish 80% of the tasks you face. OSWB does a superb job of giving the user a sizable introduction to webserver technologies that will be sufficient for most rojects, and tells you where you can get information for advanced needs...This is the first book I know of that has written their website with the exact same tools they teach you in the book, and they offer the entire source of their website for download for your investigation and reference.

The gold in this book is not just the descriptions of how the languages work, but how you can use them singly or together to create interactive websites. Their are many sample projects which let you see how everything fits together, and much of the ode can be adapted immediately to your needs. The book is extremely well integrated and organized.

I have used some of the languages described in this book, while others were completely new to me. I am definitely not a web design person, preferring to write back-end server software. owever while reading OSWB, I was charged with creating a MySQL database with a customizable web interface for my alumni organization. Using only this book and a few perldoc commands, I was able to create an interactive mod_perl website in a few days.

This book offers something to everyone, even advanced web designers. If you are starting out in Web technologies, or are curious about other ways you can get the job done, this is the book for you.

Thank you Julie Meloni, you are great.

I have just shy of a dozen other computer books--many of them are shovelware--full of glop because the publishers want thickness. And then there are some books where the authors seem to spend more time trying to show off how sophisticated they are than trying to explain things. This book has neither defect; its clear intent is to teach and it does so with economy and grace

Meloni is a solid technical writer. For those who like examples, there are lots of them (in fact a whole e-commerce site (no-I wrote mine from scratch) and there are compact appendices on the commands and functions you will actually use in the back. PHP is a language to get stuff done and this book is in the same spirit. But even supposing you want to use PHP to calculate fast Fourier transforms (heaven forbid!) this book is a good starter and supplimented by the free PHP web site, will get you there fast.

I hear a lot of comments stating, "you can find it online". Yes, its true, you can. But, when you are writing code the last thing you want is another window open or spend valuable time trying to find an answer.

The authors have done a great job laying this book out. The information is catagorized and aphabetized. There are short examples that do a good job of explaining how each function works. And what really sets it apart from others, is it tells you if the function has been deprecated and/or what version of PHP and OS supports it, it has a "see also" for each pertinent function, and a great layout(check out the sample pages).

If you program using PHP, get this book. The time it saves is well worth the price. This book is for all levels of PHP programmers, novice to experts. Don't be fooled into thinking all you need is the downloadable manual from php.net. The manual is useful, but it doesn't work as well as this book.

This book is always within arms reach when I'm programming and I'm sure it will be the same for you.

An additional problem is the reference to downloading classes on websites that no longer exist.

If you already know XML parsing, then this book is fine, but then I guess you wouldn't need the book.

Given that I was new to XML, I started at the beginning and worked my way through the book. Outside of the chapter on SVG graphics, I found this book to engage in everything I was looking for and more. Every page is filled with insight and the DOM chapter even has notes for PHP 4.3.0! Talk about the Wrox crew planning in advance! It is obvious they put a great deal of work into making sure this book is to last.

Since I'm a businessman as well as a programmer, I gained valuable insight from manner of the chapters as it appears these authors are pretty smart business people as well. By seeing all perspectives in a consistent, seemless and non-bloated manner, I can honestly say I feel like a true expert with XML technologies. The book provides many examples, clearly explained as well as well written. Given the book outlines OO examples with the functional ones, I could see both paradigms being demonstrated together. This approached has engage me and my fellow programmers to write more OO code. This book has pretty much revolutionized my way of programming and thinking. I'd recommend it to any PHP programmer, regardless of their experience.

Fantastic book!

After receiving my copy, I've been reading the entire book and as a whole, Professional PHP4 XML covers every inch of these topics in fantastic detail. I sincerely believe that new-comers to XML (and even PHP) will definitely find a wealth of information to get them started and expert programmers will enjoy the rich, deep knowledge contained in each subject, demonstrating the experience and thoroughness of all the authors who contributed to make this book the very best.

To start off my review, I want to take a look at the chapters in which I contributed, making clear to you the goals of each topic. Unlike many PHP books on the market, I didn't 'just' want to demonstrate the concepts and APIs; I really wanted to engage the reader into thinking creatively about their PHP applications by thinking about architecture and design and sharing valuable insights in areas concerned weather it be programming issues, common solutions to recurring problems, best practices, or changes to the APIs in future releases. Given that I am as much of a businessman as an architect, I also wanted to reader to consider the various business-related issues with each technology by providing valuable insight on the consequences to using these technologies in your organization. I wanted to enlighten the reader rather than bore them with functional descriptions and basic examples. As you read the book, you'll clearly see the book lives up to these goals.

My first task was to write a chapter on SAX. I've read many chapters on SAX from other texts or articles on the Internet, but I really wanted to take this one over and beyond what was already out there. Besides looking at the core concepts, process and various implementations, I explain in detail on how to create highly reusable, maintainable parsers by making use of object-oriented technology. I further explained how to deal with common problems when parsing erroneous generated XML content. Given that there are many hacked up Web Service-like URLs and XML generators out there, this section was much needed.

The DOM chapter continues teaching the reader about XML parsering by diving into the details on creating and manipulating DOM trees using PHP 4.2.1 and 4.3.0. This is something no book on the market has at the time of this review. The chapter shows countless number of examples to ensure the reader understands how to construct trees. The chapter dives into the architecture of DOM parsers and suggests much easier ways to simplify the construction of your applications. Given the DOM API is still new, the chapter outlines many of its current limitations and problems in great detail, ensuring the reader doesn't get fowled up in any dirty business that they can't fix without starring at their monitor for several hours only to see it's a problem with the API itself. This chapter discusses several larger applications that are interactive using HTML forms to show the reader how to construct XML content in an organized manner.

The last chapter, XSLT, discussed most of the XSLT standard as well as its use within PHP. This is useful since you don't need to purchase another XSLT book in the future as this chapter, as well as the appendix, should provide you with all the knowledge you'll need for years to come. Given that XSLT isn't used as much as it should, I spent a great deal outlining the various advantages and disadvantages pragmatically. Besides looking at the concepts and the XSL document standards, the chapter goes beyond simple XSL documents and explains how to build dynamic PHP scripts, interops with legacy applications, discusses the construction of multi-tiered applications, uses XSLT as a functional language, and even explains some recursive techniques to solve complicated document generation problems. Many times programmers are confused on which technology to use; this chapter compares SAX, DOM and XSLT and helps the reader decide which technology is best for your project and organization's goals. Lastly, XSLT is often overlooked when it can offer a very elegant and platform independent solution! The chapter thoroughly explains the various applications XSLT is used and even gives the reader with some vision and direction as I described how various projects used XSLT skillfully.

I hope these review helps inform you about the book's content. I hope you enjoy the book as we all did writing it. Happy reader and thanks for listening.

With the help of loads of examples and demo script to explain useful functions in php.

It's the first time I see the writer will answer the question on their web site! You can ask him if you got any problem with php and mysql, responese time is excellent!

This is a A++ recommanded book. I have recommanded all of my friend who interested in computer programming to buy it.

PS : computer program experience not required!