PHP Phrasebook (Developer's Library)

I am fairly new to the world of PHP. Most of what I have learned about these scripts has been self-taught through trial and error or gleamed through articles or scripts found on the internet. Even with my limited knowledge, I have always seen great practical usage of PHP scripts and am always trying to learn a little more on the subject. Therefore, I was really excited when I got the opportunity to review this book.

I have to admit that, at first, I was a little bit lost in reading this book. PHP Phrasebook: Essential Code and Commands is definitely not a book for beginners. However, once I started actually writing the script out and using the examples scripts as a sort of tutorial system, I quickly figured out what each set of scripts actually did. Then, I started to get ideas on how to make practical use of this new information. Moreover, as I continued through the sections, I found a good deal of solutions to problems such as manipulating strings to check usenames and passwords; protecting email addresses; pre-filling forms; and creating a secured area that I didn't have the knowledge to solve before reading this book.

Great idea, but could have been bettter. (1/1 people found this helpful)

This is a superb idea, a portable little pocket sized reference guide for php programmers. Its divided up very intelligently, and if you have a problem in php you need to solve, theres a good chance you could find a suitable code pretty quickly here. This obviously isn't for beginners, but I felt the usefulness of the book was a little hampered by the fact that the german author, Christian Wenz, seems to have a rather idosyncratic command of english. Consequently, as someone who has been using php for a couple of years, some of the explanations here were very difficult to understand. I'm giving it 4 stars however, because for the professional php programmer, its probably very useful and the best of its type around.

Concise, to the point, easy and fast to use... soooooo useful ! (2/2 people found this helpful)

At 2:00am, several hours in to debugging some niggling problem, which you just can't see for looking too hard, like formatting dates or getting sessions to work, the last thing you need is some lengthy, academic explanation. You just want some code that WILL DEFINATELY WORK.
PHP Phrasebook gives you just that. The balance between being concise and at the same time bieng complete enough so you understand the code you're about to use, makes this book a real productivity tool.
There are other great books that I'll get off the shelf to help me understand something in more depth, like Core Web Development with PHP and MySQL (by Marc Wandschneider) and PHP & MYSQL Web Development (by Welling & Thomson), but this tiny book lives on my desk, usually open, face down, and within arms length.

PHP Phrasebook (Developer's Library)

Christian Wenz

Reader Reviews:

PHP Phrasebook (0/0 people found this helpful)

Great idea, but could have been bettter. (1/1 people found this helpful)

Concise, to the point, easy and fast to use... soooooo useful ! (2/2 people found this helpful)

Similar Products

Categories