“Beginning PHP4″ published by Wrox Press serves to fill the void
of books written by professionals for open-source product. PHP
4.0.0 was released in May 2000 and since then PHP, a server-side,
cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language has been growing
on the popularity of the previous version, PHP 3.0.”
“This book is written by a team of authors, namely Wankyu Choi,
Allan Kent, Chris Lea, Ganesh Prasad, Chris Ullman with two
contributing authors: Jon Blank and Sean Cazzell. This is not a
case of “too many cooks spoil the broth” as the pool of experience
tends to broaden its coverage.”
“It is targeted at practically anyone with HTML knowledge who is
interested in developing dynamic web applications using PHP 4. It
is not a prerequisite to have any computer programming knowledge at
all but access to any web server and a relational database
management system is a must, to fully utilise this book.”
“Unsurprisingly, this thick 800 page book comprises of 17
chapters and 2 appendices. Each chapter is structured nicely,
starting with an introduction and ending with a summary. Examples
are given under “Try It Out” sections that include a “How It Works”
subsection to explain in detail what goes on behind each line of
code. Users are not expected to regurgitate the code in the example
but to understand them well so that they could customise it and
write their own code to suit their requirements. A good way to
learn a new programming language is to use this approach of
learning by example.”