“One language of note riding the Penguin’s wake is a web
scripting language called PHP that has gathered users at an
impressive rate. PHP competes against a sea of languages used to
generate “dynamic web pages”–pages that consist partly or wholly
of code and are interpreted every time they are viewed. Rival
languages include Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP), Allaire’s
Cold Fusion and even Perl. More established competition would be
hard to find.”
“PHP’s popularity is further evidenced by sales of the book Core
PHP Programming by Leon Atkinson, one of the few available books on
the language. The book, having already sold out of its first
printing, has placed consistently in the bestsellers at the on-line
computer book retailers. And, according to Atkinson’s web page, a
second edition is being considered.”
“With only one PHP book available, such popularity might be
attributed to the subject rather than the quality of the book. In
this case, PHP might as well be BASIC, for Atkinson’s writing
stands among the best in the expanse of computer books, bucking the
trend of quantity over quality that plagues so many
thousand-plus-page books. Atkinson’s writing is uncommonly concise
and comprehensive.”