PHP Cookbook (2nd Edition), by David Sklar & Adam Trachtenberg

Posted October 17th, 2006 by Taran

One of the inherent beauties of PHP is how versatile it is. You can write quick hacks in it, or write a full blown content management system. It's a robust language with semicolons which is an integral part of LAMP servers around the world. It's open source, and it's fairly easy to learn for even the most novice of programmers.

The trick, sometimes, is getting it to do the little things that you want it to do. Suddenly, you may need to write something which deals with SOAP and you may need some pointers. Maybe you want to parse some XML, or maybe you want to generate it. Or maybe you need to read and write a compressed file. Whatever it is, maybe you're doing it for the first time in PHP, or perhaps the first time ever. Maybe you have so many languages in your head that it's nice to have a reference just to remind you how you do things within PHP. Enter the PHP Cookbook, 2nd Edition, which puts code and explanations together with distinct titles related to problems.

The book itself weighs in at 758 pages and is split into 26 sections. These sections cover an impressive amount of code solutions to real world problems.

The sheer volume of the amount of stuff the book addresses is staggering. It's not a light book, and it's not intended for non-programmers. While it does have introductions on various topics, the thrust of the book is 'getting stuff done by example'. From string manipulations to dynamic instantiations, I have been surprised (and even educated) by this book. A clue about object oriented programming is needed to understand a lot of what the book talks about (for example, polymorphism). If you are a programmer or aspire to become one using PHP - this book is written for you. Many sections tie it all together in an example application, but the thrust of the book throughout is answering the questions for dealing with the smaller issues.

On a more personal note - this was one of the reviews where I got to learn and expand my own toolset. Kudos to the authors!

PHP Cookbook is a programmer's book written by programmers. It's a no nonsense book that belongs at the fingertips of most PHP programmers for those, 'how do I do that?' moments. While the book could be a good workbook for learning PHP, I don't know that I would recommend that to completely new programmers. But for veterans of other languages, this book may well be the stepping stone to functional PHP skills in a very short time frame.