Suggest a book.

Can anyone suggest a book on PHP that is written from the perspective that the reader is a programmer or knowledgeable of a programming language??

As i am a Java programmer, i dont need a very basic book, but one that that will gloss over the basics and get to the hard core stuff right away.

Thanks

the one i'm using is

"Core PHP programming" (second edition) by Leon Atkinson

it's not the newest one though. it comes with php 4.0.0

"the author is Chief Technologist for Clear Ink Corporation. He is creator and maintainer of the FreeTrade project, an Open Source e-commerce toolkit."

and no i'm not advertising, i just like the book.

Thanks . Will check it out.

I own PHP and MySQL Web Development (1st edition... the 2nd just came out) by Welling and Thomson and it's the best technical book I've ever owned.

It does cover the basics of PHP and MySQL, but it's aimed at intermediate to advanced users, so most of the book is about more advanced things in PHP. It focuses on e-commerce, but you'll learn a lot more than just how to make a shopping card. You'll learn about all the important PHP things (how to interact with the filesystem, sessions, image creation (2nd ed.), working with MySQL, text-files, regular expressions), good software engineering practices and database design. The later part of the book also goes through some larger PHP/MySQL applications, such as a web-based email system and a forum.

Although intermediate readers can follow everything in the book with relative ease, I don't think it would bore you, since only the first part of the book is on very basic stuff. All the later stuff will teach you about all the cooler, advanced and more useful things for PHP / MySQL application development.

Thanks, will definately consider it.

Ohhh, by the way, I'd reccomend you check the user-ratings of the book you're considering (with other similar books) at amazon.com. Even if you're in, say, the UK, you'll still want to check amazon.com (instead of .co.uk). Amazon.co.uk only lets people rate an item if they write a review (silly, imho), so there aren't very many ratings there. Amazon.com has the most.

Thanks again. I have been doing that, but i got a list of over 100 books for PHP, so I decided to see if i could get a better suggestion here. Thanks

Mastering PHP 4.1 by Jeremy Allen and Charles Hornberger

NOTE: This book WILL definitely talk about what you might already know. But in my opinion, as I also came from a Java background, it's a great thing that the book does. The language construct and elements between PHP and Java are somewhat different, albeit the logic are the same (as is the case for programming languages). The great part though, is you will get to actually work with advanced stuff such as LDAP, emails, PDFs, and other stuff. Just look at it at amazon.com, and see what people has to say about it.

I second the vote for this book, I also have this one and it's tattered and worn by now. Offers more real-world examples (and code) then I'll probably ever use, from basic PHP to advanced techniques. I will say that it may not be the best 'PHP' only book, in that a main portion of the book is focused on MySQL and creating web platforms like shopping carts and the like (well, just like CodE-E just said =) ).

Save your money and don't waste it on any PHP book at the moment. 9 out of every 10 PHP books on the market right now are filled with depreciated syntax and very outdated information. The forums here are more valuable and the most knowledgable source of information for PHP. There is literly thousands and thousands lines of code floating around here in the threads with detailed explanations of the code fragments.

Another reason why it would be best to wait as the PHP5 books should be rolling out on the market here within the next few months...

Oooo.. Thanks . Great advice. I think i shall wait a lil for the next version.

I have to second this post... Sam's PHP book by Welling & Thomson is truly one of the most well-written technical books I've ever purchased. If you had to get 1 book to start yourself off learning PHP/MySQL, this is the book.

At the risk of incurring the wrath of jpenn, I have to respectfully disagree with the position that purchasing technical books is a 'waste of money'.

When one is learning a new programming language, not all of that learning comes from pure developing. A good portion of that learning comes from first reading through examples of code, theory, and explanations of what the various syntactic expressions do. One great value of a book is that it can be read away from the computer - and one's knowledge of the new language's concepts can grow even outside of working through coding examples. Another would be the 'immediate reference' a book can provide - through reading & working with coding exercises in a book, one builds a 'mental topography' of that book; this can be useful when an example is required to 'jog your memory' to solve a problem; if you have that mental topography of your technical book, chances are you'll have a quick & reliable method of finding an example that is useful to the situation at hand.

Regarding the coding examples provided in a book vs. provided online: While learning from online resources is valuable, there is a certain continuity provided by a technical book which cannot, save through duplication of the basic 'book' format, be expressed in an ad-hoc online tutorial, where coding examples are provided by a range of different authors, from different perspectives, etc.

That continuity is very important - within the context of a printed technical book, the author(s) has an ongoing sense of which topics have been covered, what concepts have been mastered, and of the sequence of material which needs to be presented in order to build a foundation of knowledge upon which a developer new to that language can build their own expertise.

I also must take issue with the idea that books detailing PHP4 are somehow invalid with the forthcoming release of PHP5.

For instance, many 3rd-party hosting providers are still running PHP v4.0x - Verio, one of the larger hosting companies, comes to mind as an example of a hoster which is still running (and will likely continue to run) an older version of the language. As a developer, if you're working w/ a client who has already established a relationship or signed a contract with a server provider, you are then forced to work within the framework that the server host provides; if you're only PHP knowledge begins w/ v5.x, you could be at a slight disadvantage if the host is running v4.x.

I do believe it is important to stay current in terms of one's technical knowledge. However, having said that, what percentage of servers are running Apache 2.0? MySQL 4.012? PHP 4.31? Understanding not only the current release, but also a few versions before the current one, can be incredibly valuable.

Lol


Well, I have a complete library of books - you are right, buying technical books is not a waste of money. But, thats why in my post I put in there wait until the PHP5 books come out. This is extremely important to someone that is new to the language in general as by the time they shuffle through the books (the old outdated books on the market today) the new ones will be out shortly after reflecting quite a few changes and updates.

The big thing to remember is there is absolutely nothing in the current books that are on the market today that can not be found here on the forums 5 times over, and even more.

To make this more evident is if you search the forums you will find massive posts that say 'I AM NEW TO PHP AND FOLLOWING THIS EXAMPLE FROM THIS BOOK AND IT DOES NOT WORK'.

This is your best book. Go to http://www.devshed.com/Other_Stuff/Propaganda and download the binder cover page and spine, print it out - slap it in a binder and print out threads from the forums here; 3 hole punch them and "INSERT INTO 3_ring_binder WHERE binder = 'your_best_resource'" - - -

I definitely support the notion that it's a good idea to wait and make sure the hard earned cash you're putting down on coding books are up-to-date and also have a relevance to what you want to do. Obviously this is almost impossible to do until you've spent a little money on books and spent equal time coding / searching the web for answers.

Based on this thread, I went out today to my local B&N to look for PHP books. I found several (maybe 10 separate titles), and looked carefully through each book to see if I could find any value in them. In a majority of the books I looked at, the ideas, chapters and material covered was so close I had to laugh. I found the 2nd edition of 'PHP and MySQL Web Development' (in the MySQL section, beware) and basically base my opinion of other books against that, because I own and have thoroughly read the 1st edition. The book 'Core PHP Programming' was almost identical. Same thing with the book 'PHP Bible' and 'Professional PHP Programming'. These are all thick PHP books with alot of real-world examples that range from SQL to image creation to user authentication, file manipulation and PDF document creation. Look through a couple of these, pick one that seems to you to be layed out the way that makes sense, and that's about all you need. If I had to pick one now, I'd get 'Core PHP Programming'. I liked the layout the best, and the content seems easy to follow.

Once you get one of these books, the rest of what you'll need can be found on forums, tutorials and www.php.net/manual. All free (well, less the cost of an internet connection, but who among us hasn't written that off long ago as a vital necessity anyway =) ).

Now, having said all that, I did look at and purchase an O'Reilly book, 'PHP CookBook', which is much more of a 'how do solve X problem in PHP' for already prepped PHP coders than an introductory to PHP. There are all sorts of cool ways of doing things you may have never thought of.