This is a well organized, easy to read introduction to PHP 5. It covers the basics of the language and enough more to enable the reader to do much useful work on the web.

| book organization | my likes | my gripes | who for |

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How is this book organized?

This book is part of the Addison Wesley Professional Spring Into Series. Part of what this means is that it is explicitly divided into manageable units.

In this case there are 9 chapters, all of moderate length (actually from 32 to 36 pages). Each chapter is divided into

• a brief intro
• a number of short chunks on specific topics
• a brief summary

See Chapter Titles in the left column for a list of the chapters and for how to view the full table of contents.

Each short chunk begins with a clearly marked title at the top of a page and takes up either one or two pages. Here's some examples of chunk titles:

• Creating Arrays
• Retrieving Data from Text Fields
• Creating an Object
• Setting Cookies

There are lots of examples in the chunks.

There are also two appendixes: one on PHP language elements and one a function reference.

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What do I especially like?

I especially like

• the simple rigorous way the book is organized
• the presentation of PHP basics
• the many examples
• the unusual clarity of the book

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What gripes do I have?

OK, I have some minor gripes.

Download Directories: When I downloaded the example's, I found the examples for Chapter 9 in the ch10 directory, which I found a tad confusing. The ch09 directory contained graphic examples that are not in the book at all. I would have preferred that ch09 be the directory containing Chapter 9 examples and that the directory containing graphics examples be called Bonus or something like that.

This is a very minor problem, and now that you are aware of it mostly it's a matter of having some extra examples.

I first reported this very minor problem 2005-09-28, but as of 2005-10-08 the fix hasn't appeared in any of the downloads I've done, though it occurs to me that could be due to some kind of caching problem.

Learning: The book is very good at teaching the basics of the PHP language. However, the book does not try to teach the reader how to program. E.g. For the most part it does not delve into tradeoffs between various approaches to a problem.

This may not be a fault at all but rather a wise limitation.

I do wish the book put more attention on learning to learn. For example, the functions show_source and var_dump which I've found quite useful in learning don't make it into the index.

Combo Chapters: Two of the chapters combine different topics that don't seem closely related to me.

• Handling Strings and Arrays
• Object Oriented Programming and File Handling

I would have preferred the author split each of these chapters into two chapters.

Does this matter much? No, the chapters are very clear.

Also, there certainly is some relationship between strings and arrays. For example, there is a chunk on "Imploding and Exploding Arrays" which shows how to convert between the two using the implode and explode functions.

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Who's the book for?

This book would be ideal for someone who

• is reasonably comfortable with HTML.
• wants to generate pages dynamically from the server side.
• doesn't already know PHP but wants to learn it.

Some reasons you might not want this book are:

• You just aren't interested in PHP.
• You already know PHP.
• You need to know the differences between PHP 4 and 5.

I've recommended this book to two people in user groups I'm in to help get them started with PHP. This is the best tutorial introduction to PHP basics I've encountered.

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Smiley Rating: :) :) :) :)  (very good)