PHP Developer's Dictionary

I'm only giving this four stars because the information is freely available elsewhere. Nonetheless, this book is a wonderful reference to have on hand. It's the only PHP book (and I have plenty) that consistently sits on my desk. I find it to be a valuable reference tool for quick lookups, and for finding functions that I'm not sure how to spell. It's a dictionary--not a tutorial. It doesn't teach you how to write your code (when was the last time you used a regular dictionary to come up with structure and form for a poem? You don't. You use it to look up words.) If you're looking for tutorials, you'd be better off looking elsewhere. If you use PHP day in day out, you might find having a paper reference on your desk to be helpful. Sometimes you just don't want to have to call up another web browser to search php.net, or wait until your DSL provider decides to spring back to life and allow you to search the net for a bit of syntax that has slipped your mind. The price is right, and it's a good reference book to have in addition to a book of tutorials or other learning material.

Most of this book is the VERY BASIC description of operators, functions, constants, objects, properties, and methods and that's about it.It breaks them down into categories (string manipulation, database, etc) and then has a SHORT description of what they do and what arguements need to be passed to them, etc. Other than that, there isn't much else there.[..].One of the main problems I have with this book (and others like it) is that you have to know the name of the function or object to use it. If I want to know how to use mysql_connect, then that's no problem. However, if I want to know how to yank the two left most characters out of a string, I guess I'm going to be browsing every function in the string section until I find it.This book just takes the wrong approach. If I had all of that stuff memorized, then I probably wouldn't need the book. However, since I don't have it memorized, it's rather hard to find it in the book since I don't know the name of it.Would have gave it 3 stars except it basically does meet the criteria that it is advertised under, so I can't knock it for that. So, for being a categorized list of the PHP language then it's great (although, how hard can that be. I wonder if I too can print out the PHP.net documentation and get it published).

Go figgure, a book that lives up to *exactly* what the title says, PHP Developer's Dictionary. This is not a "how-to", "Learn PHP in 12 minutes", or "PHP for the mentally challanged " type of book, it is a reference. If you already know what you want to do, and how to do it, but need to know what a function does, the syntax to connect to an LDAP directory or MySQL database, or other essential bit of info... this is *the* book for you. If you are new to developing, or to PHP, you may want to look at something else and come back and get this one once you have the basics (atleast) down. When someone tells you to RTFM when you ask a PHP related question, here it is :)