Ferro said
I have spend about a week with this book. I was quite pleased with the material, which were to the point nothing garbage and you can quickly go down the road but well after i stumbled across some code defects, i came here to amazon to see what is the story.
So yes while the book can be very useful. It has not been quite proofread (rather not at all). It seems it was upgraded from version 4 (my guess) without doing any work.
For example I just spend about 3 hours and possibly more to read a record with encrypted password (chap 11) and it did not work. I was following everything according to the book so you can see how frustrated one can be. Online help did not help much so i was stuck.
After browsing for quite a while, I found that the password field in the book was stored in 20 char (varchar(20)). When the password was encrypted and stored, it was converted to 41 char (or so) hence part of it was lost. Now when you retrieve this password, it will never work. So I finally changed the password field to 50 and everything worked fine then. Now this is just one big. In chapter 11 i found 2 more serious bugs, the code were not working (and is still not working). So i will not recommend a beginner to go through this book esp chapter 11. It will almost make you sweet! I really spent quite a lot of my time just to fix the bugs. The material is good though and track is good too. But I would recommend it only for reading and just for basic beginning programming. The code needs some serious work! You probably are better off with another book. I am glad i got it from library, it is not my own :)
I guess i can't change the stars but deserves 2 or 2.5 not 3.
Dwight Suzuki said
I'm new to PHP (with some experience in HTML and C++) and I found this a good ground-floor introduction to the basics of the language. It also walks you through setting up your own web server (which I had found intimidating, but this book made it fairly easy).
That said, there are a LOT of typos, both in the text and the code. For that reason, I would not recommend buying this book at full price (I got it for free at the library).
Readers should take everything with a grain of salt and also should consult the publisher's "erratum" page before reading: http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/productCd-0764557831,descCd-view_errata.html
And a memo to the authors: next time, use spell check!
V. Nalupta said
I'm a recent Comp Sci grad from University of Maryland, so I'm pretty well versed in lots of programming languages. I needed to learn PHP for an employer and I saw this book in borders. Out of all the books there, I liked this one the best because of the learning flow, and it had exercises for you to do on your own - something most php books don't have.
However, the good news ends right about there. I am just starting the 3rd chapter and I am CONVINCED THAT THERE IS NO WAY this book could have gone thru an editor. It seriously seems like it was just written and printed! This book gets 2 stars because:
1) Every code example I've done so far (about 4 in the 2nd chapter, WOULD NOT RUN, even though I copied and pasted straight from the book. I actually had to debug the book!!! The bugs were simple things too, like missing semicolons or concat (.) symbols. If I weren't already used to debugging, then I would've pulled my hair out trying to find out what's wrong.
2) The solutions to the questions at the end of the 2nd chapter use programming concepts that they didn't introduce yet! A forloop is used in the solution, but loops aren't covered until chapter 4! When I went back to check my answer I thought to myself, 'Are you kidding me?!'
Now, I usually don't write reviews on amazon, but I had to write one for this book. There must be MUCH BETTER books for php than this one. If you're paying this much money for something, you shouldn't have to settle for these kinds of problems. Do yourself a favor and buy ANY other book and make up your own test questions to solve. Thank God my employer paid for this and I didnt blow money on a book that wasn't edited at all.
John Bonham said
I gave up on this book due to the abundance of coding errors. Each time there was a mistake in their code, it took me quite a lot of time to figure out what the error was and fix it - time I don't have, when trying to learn something new.
Wrox needs to be tougher with its authors and technical reviewers. Instead of accepting that errors are just part of the publishing experience, they should be trying to inculcate a culture of meticulousness and excellence. Until then, people like me will drop their books flat.
Chris Gaeden said
The numerous grammar and coding errors in this book make it one to completely avoid if you are new to PHP programming. Fortunately, I was familiar enough with PHP to catch most of the coding errors.
The thing that probably bothered me the most was the fact that many of the explanations of the code given in the book refer to code that isn't even printed in the book! The explanations seemed to refer to a previous revision, rather than the code in the final printed version. Whoever was the project manager and/or proofreader of this book should be shamed and then fired.
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