R. U. Coding said
Unless you are required to buy this book for a class, I would save the 75+ bucks. There is very little detailed information in here, and the most extensive sections are the exercises at the end of each chapter. There are many other books out there for a fraction of the price that will serve as reference volumes long after you've gotten everything you can possibly get out of this one (check out O'Reilly press). All of these "Course Technology" editions by Thompson/Cengage are so pretty to look at on your bookshelf, but so lacking in useful content. Good info for someone with little or no programming experience, but even then - just not worth the price. Unfortunately many of us college students are like sitting ducks to these publishers, easy targets for their marketing scams.
J. Fischer said
It seems like a fairly thorough text on all the various aspects of PHP. How would one know, however, unless one studies another book along side? One major flaw which is very serious: there are typographical errors in coding examples AND explanatory texts. For a programming language that is an unacceptable feature. As a learner, one is dependent on the text being correct. Another pedagogical shortcoming is that some of the exercises ask the user to type in a block of code with mistakes in it. Then it asks the user to correct them. Personally I think that gives the user the opportunity to learn bad coding practice.
Sarah Nielsen said
This is a pretty good book to learn PHP and MySQL, but there are alot of errors. I had to get extra help in some areas just because the book had the wrong statements shown. It got very frustrating at those times. I basically had to proofread parts of the book for them. Other than that, it does give you a good basic background of PHP and MySQL.
kh said
This was the required textbook for a class I was taking. I was worried when I saw all the 1 star reviews, but it wasn't that bad. Yes, it has significant typos, but if your instructor tells you about them, it isn't such a problem. I learned a lot, and both the examples throughout the chapter and the hands-on projects were useful.
anonymous said
I had to buy this book for a class I'm taking.
This book has too many mistakes, including typos, grammar errors, incorrect wording, errors in opinion, and errors regarding rules about how the code will compile.
This book needs someone to edit it and another person to check the validity of what is written and make corrections where needed.
It's a shame that it was published with so many bugs. Hopefully, the next version will be better. But even then, at $70 a copy the price is too high.
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