PHP 5 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach

Generally, I'm not a big fan of cookbooks (for programming!) but this one is really good. A great reference to have as you are coding and think "oh... how do i do X again?" or just to read and review. Another use - give a copy to your friends who STILL are writing PHP 4 code!

I normally don't write reviews unless I had a bad experience. However, in this case, the PHP 5 Recipes book is an exception! I love this book! The examples are CORRECT!! The information I need is very well organized - I really love the way that the book was organized! I wish all of my tech books for other languages were arranged in this problem-solution manner. The information you need to build a robust and well organized and valid website is here in the book! I definitely highly recommend that you get THIS book if you are thinking about doing some php work. The php code they have is on the mark! The authors included more than I needed by including a section on XML/XSLT with PHP. Definitely get this book!

More than just a recipe book, PHP 5 Recipes is an outstanding overview of many PHP tools and techniques.... and while Apress suggests the book is published for programmers already somewhat familiar with PHP, its clear language and great example sets make it useful for someone learning PHP. Each chapter starts with a basic review of the foundation of the subject matter to be covered: the variables section, for example, begins with a "PHP 101"-style review of how PHP variables are identified and used. Each chapter then builds from these basics to cover more advanced techniques. Two final notes: First, this is certainly one of the best written programming guides I own: The language is clear and obvious effort went into making the book both readable and enjoyable. Second, the code provided through the publisher's web site is clean and typo-free, which is especially helpful (and not always a sure thing with programming books). A real resource.

I am a big fan of 'recipe' books. They collect solutions to a variety of common problems into a single volume for easy reference, often times pointing out features in an extensive language environment that were missed when first learned. This book is no exception. I had been coding PHP for close to a year when I picked up this book. I found most of the coding and examples to be fairly familiar, but forcing myself to read through ever page I have expanded my coding with several standard functions that I had no use for when first learning the language (and thus had forgotten about). The writing style is very readable, and the code is targeted at the beginning to intermediate PHP coder. Beginners to PHP will benefit from reading through the entire book; those with more experience are better off skimming the first half of the book and reading the latter sections. The topics covered are fairly complete and include: arrays, strings, imaging, database, files and web forms. I would have liked a more detailed coverage of XML and SOAP, but the basics are provided for these technologies. If you are an experienced PHP coder you may gain something from this book (like I did), but you would probably get just as much by browsing the official PHP site's function list to refresh your memory of what is available. My recommendation, for PHP beginners, is that this book coupled with Jason Gilmore's Beginning PHP and MySQL makes an excellent pair to learn PHP and should have you up to speed in no time. Add Matt Zandstra's PHP 5 Objects, Patterns, and Practice and you have a fairly complete PHP library suitable for an experienced programmer's reference shelf. P-)

I have to admit that I really enjoy having a good recipe style book in my library whenever possible and this is a good PHP 5 recipe book. The advantage of these books is simple. You find the problem you need resolved and you follow the recipe to resolve it. This problem-solution approach is very efficient and just what you need when you just want a quick answer. With over 200 recipes it focuses on new features of PHP 5 and taking advantage of the most popular PHP extensions. Some of the areas covered include arrays, dates and times, strings, files, regular expressions, web basics, forms, markup, and MySQL. For each area the authors include various problems that are commonly encountered or that can be resolved more efficiently with the new features, the code snippet to resolve the problem, and then an in depth analysis of the code and how it works. For the PHP 5 programmer this is a valuable reference that they will be sure to be reach for often when dealing with new programming challenges. PHP 5 Recipes is highly recommended.