KillerSites Blog

Book Review: PHP 5 in Practice

December 11, 2006

Intermediate level book for active php programmers. From the book’s cover:

‘Recipes and solutions for PHP programmers’

This is a very good book, actually one of the best recipe books I’ve read period.

You can tell that the authors are still actively writing code – you can feel it as you read the chapters. The book consist of a series of techniques (they call recipes) that are commonly needed by php programmers.

Some example recipes:

  • How to Sort Arrays
  • Send HTTP headers
  • Encode a string for use in a URL

… this book is packed with all kinds of php goodies. There is much more to be found .. I just never list too much from a book since you can easily look it up online.

😉

THE ‘QUICK HITS’

After a brief introduction, each chapter provides a bunch of micro-tips related to the recipes discussed in the chapter. They call these tips: ‘quick hits’.

I found the ‘quick hits’ to be very useful because they provide a very concise and easy to read look at aspects of the php language. I can see myself referring to this book often just because of the ‘quick hits’.

I actually keep this book nearby to flip through once and a while, just to give me ideas. It has already helped on a php 5 project I am working on.

CONCLUSION

This I think is a great book. It has lots of practical information and is without a doubt, one of the most useful books on programming I’ve read – and I’m talking all languages.

Buy the book if you work with PHP or planning to.

Stefan Mischook

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