The Joy of PHP: A Beginner's Guide to Programming Interactive Web Applications with PHP and mySQL

So many books seem to want to front-load a bunch of theory about for loops and how many bytes a certain statement might take up. Generally, I understand the concepts, but part of me yearns to "get my hands dirty", as I find I feel disconnected from true understanding. I don't care if it's the simplest thing, I want to start "doing" something, and this is where this book really shines.Alan Forbes gives a very practical education on PHP. Right away, he has you set up a virtual server, and quickly moves you into a practical example setting up a database for a used car lot. It's down to Earth, approachable, and teaches the exact concepts that I was looking for in PHP.I'm about half way through the book and in a little more than a week, I've begun coding in PHP, using a virtual server, and created mySQL databases! whereas with some of the thicker, encyclopedic tomes that I have, I'd still be trudging through snippets of unrelated code, still not knowing what I'm actually supposed to do with it. This is one of those books that makes you feel that PHP is possible for a beginner to use.There are a few minor drawbacks, but they don't take away at all from the great value of this book.The first is the editing (I have the 2015 edition). The code works, but every now and then I find a minor typo like on pg. 87 line 36 (no openingtag) and like pg. 89 line 7 (where he creates a variable called $mysqli and in the explanation refers to it as $con (which messed me up for a bit trying to figure out where $con was)). The book sometimes makes reference to color highlighted code, but the printing is black and white. Some pictures are missing. For example pg. 101 he says, your table "should look like this:" and there is a space with no picture.The next thing is that I felt a little bit like I was tossed in the deep end pretty quickly. He went from some simple concepts to a 79 line program pretty quickly. It felt a little overwhelmed, but going through his line-by-line explanation a few times, I finally began picking up the concepts, and when I finally got to the end of the first program, I really felt like I had a decent handle on what was going on. It was an abrupt way to begin, but by the end I felt like I got a lot out of it.If you're thinking about buying this book, I would recommend it as a companion book to learning PHP as a whole. Luckily for me, I had been messing around with JavaScript for a few weeks prior to picking up this book, and understood some of the concepts of OOP. Alan Forbes quickly introduces these topics, but doesn't go in depth on them.Where the book really shines is in its practical introduction to PHP. The examples are great, and Alan Forbes breaks them down line by line to tell you exactly what the code is doing. Well worth the purchase price since I feel like I actually learned something.Thank you Alan Forbes!

Disclaimer: I was also a donor to the Kickstarter campaign for this book.This book is a great resource for those wanting to get into PHP development and not be bombarded by an assault of Google results for "introduction to PHP". It walks you through just about everything you'll need to get started with the language and explains it in a nice, easy to read way. It's not one of those 200 lbs gorilla books that try to contain every single thing that PHP has to offer. Instead, it focuses on the audience it was intended for, providing a good overview of the language and how to get your feet wet.I'd give it five stars but I have to reiterate some of the comments waerloga mentioned. There are some spots in the examples where a few filtering methods tossed in (not even that complex, maybe something like filter_var that's easy to explain) to help teach "the right way" to handle user input. The author has already said that this is an improvement planned for future versions of the book, so I'm confident that it can be easily remedied.

I read a lot of technical books and I find they almost always fall into two categories either they're an encyclopedia of all the features of a specific language in a highly technical jargon or they spend 2/3 of the text covering extremely basic concepts in programming and they do it using 300 or 400 hundred pages. This book is succinct and readable and doesn't overwhelm the reader with a lot of technical white noise.If you're a first time programmer with absolutely no idea how to get started this book should probably be the second or third book you should read. Maybe get a book that goes in depth about the core underpinnings of computer programming first just to make this a little more readable.For someone like myself this is a great starting point after reading this and going through the exercises I feel ready to find one of the encyclopedic books on PHP to use as a reference while I work on my own projects.I can see why some of the folks gave this book 3 or fewer stars I read most of those reviews and I see some of the points in them, but lets take this book for what it is and that's a good first step on a long journey. The version I have does cover a lot of bare bones basics on security and to be honest if you take only this book as it stands and create a program for your company or a customer then you're looking to get hacked. I know I'm certainly going to research more on the weaknesses of php security before anything I write makes it into production.What I would have liked to have seen, though the author does touch on all of these or at least points you in the right direction, are as follows. Another paragraph or two on the include statement and how important that can be to making code easier to write and maintain. A listing in the appendix of several useful php functions. Maybe some ideas or additional php projects the reader can try to write on his own, even if they're just a couple of sentences describing the project with no code to get the reader started.All of the above mentioned however are just nit picking which is why I gave this book five stars. I would definitely buy other books from this author if they covered subjects I needed to study. All in all a good book and a good job by the author.

For me the book did not live up to the expectation that I had and that's also created in for example the foreword in the book. It's not a book about PHP programming in general and how to become a PHP programmer, but more on how to integrate PHP and mySQL. Which is of course very important, but by no means the whole story. The definition of functions is for example only mentioned briefly and the concept of Object Oriented programming is nowhere to be found.So if you want to read an introduction on how the integrate PHP with mySQL, then this book will give you a good number of code-examples to get your teeth into. If you are looking for an allround textbook on PHP then you should look further.