Great book: Advanced PHP Programming
 | ||
 | Email weblog link | |
 | Discuss | |
 | Blog this |
Derek Sivers
May. 12, 2004 05:15 PM
Permalink
URL: http://www.isbn.nu/0672325616...
This book just got me excited about PHP again: Advanced PHP Programming by George Schlossnagle.I've been programming in PHP full-time for 5 years now. I remember when I was first learning, how all the books felt a little over my head, in a good way. Very slowly I understood things that didn't make sense before. And then very slowly I'd start to incorporate those things into my day-to-day programming.
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.
It's written entirely in PHP5 with things I had never heard about, like MySQL's new Prepared Statements and Bound Parameters. (More on that subject later.) Great chapters on benchmarking and profiling. Really nice to see him using the PHP5 style OOP, marking all methods and attributes as public, private, or protected. 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!
Derek Sivers is the founder, president, and sole programmer behind CD Baby, independent music distribution, and HostBaby, web hosting for musicians.
Showing messages 1 through 1 of 1.
| Showing messages 1 through 1 of 1. |
Return to weblogs.oreilly.com.
Weblog authors are solely responsible for the content and accuracy of their weblogs, including opinions they express, and O'Reilly Media, Inc., disclaims any and all liabililty for that content, its accuracy, and opinions it may contain.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
I started reading "Advanced PHP Programming" on your recommendation, but I am disappointed at the errors that I find in the first few chapters, and am wondering about all the rest! Can I trust it? I tried to find an errata on the web, but without success.
Examples:
p38: "a class constructor should be named __constructor()," then he uses __construct().
p44: "polymorphism. This is derived from Latin..."
p46: ' " . mysql_escape... (missing closing quote)
p65: "that changes it's API..."
It's hard enough as it is, considering I have zero OOP experience, I'd like to be able to trust what I'm reading. Granted, none of the above are earth-shattering, but are they the tip of the iceberg and am I picking up only them because I don't already master the subject?
Cheers,
Pierre