PHP Phrasebook

My first book on PHP was Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache All in One (3rd Edition) (Sams Teach Yourself) which was great to get me started. But once I started designing and writing in PHP it was not very helpful. I have had this phrase bookon only 2 days and already I have used four examples (uploading a CSV file, saving form data, and two string manipulation funcitons). The index and organization are laid out like I think ..."how do I load a CSV file?" ... look up CSV and there's real examples plus cautions on how to look out and deal with problems. When I am writing now, this book will be next to me!

This book is one of those that you like to keep at arms length. It has a lot of useful code that comes in handy. I liked it so much I purchased the MySQL Phrasebook as well.

This is quite possible the best book I have purchased so far, and I buy a new book every couple of months. I usually to use the Pocket References from O'Rielly but this new Phrasebook series looks like a great replacement. Full of short blocks of code that are easily adaptable to what ever your doing.

With this book Christian Wenz and SAMS are trying to launch a new concept, sort of a condensed "programming cookbook" that can be used as a portable quick reference as well. The author brilliantly manages to keep a balance, being concise and relevant at the very same time. The code samples are well written and up to date with PHP 5; plenty of notes and tips provide valuable words of wisdom. The topic lends itself very well to this format, since PHP has hundreds of functions and many details that are often hard to remember. I really enjoyed this book and I am looking forward to see more titles published along the same series.

I work with PHP quite a lot, but I keep on forgetting things: How do I prefill a form without introducing security vulnerabilities, how do I connect to which database (in our company, we use several different systems), how do I provide web services, how do I sort arrays in natural language order, and so on. This book contains so many phrases I need in my daily work so that it really helps me save time. Thumbs up!