PHP : A BEGINNER'S GUIDE
and over 900,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| |||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Essential Skills--Made Easy!
Learn how to build dynamic, data-driven Web applications using PHP. Covering the latest release of this cross-platform, open-source scripting language, PHP: A Beginner's Guide teaches you how to write basic PHP programs and enhance them with more advanced features such as MySQL and SQLite database integration, XML input, and third-party extensions. This fast-paced tutorial provides one-stop coverage of software installation, language syntax and data structures, flow control routines, built-in functions, and best practices.
Designed for Easy Learning:
- Key Skills & Concepts--Lists of specific skills covered in the chapter
- Ask the Expert--Q&A sections filled with bonus information and helpful tips
- Try This--Hands-on exercises that show how to apply your skills
- Notes--Extra information related to the topic being covered
- Tips--Helpful reminders or alternate ways of doing things
- Cautions--Errors and pitfalls to avoid
- Self-Tests--Chapter-ending quizzes to test your knowledge
- Annotated Syntax--Example code with commentary that describes the programming techniques being illustrated
About the Author
Vikram Vaswani is the founder and CEO of Melonfire, a company specializing in software consultancy and content creation and syndication services. He is the author of PHP Programming Solutions, How to do Everything with PHP and MySQL, and MySQL: The Complete Reference. Vikram is the author of numerous well-received articles on open-source technologies (including Perl, Python, XML and the very popular PHP 101 series), all written with the goal of making complex technologies accessible and understandable to novice users. He has been developing software since 1995, was first introduced to PHP in 1998, and hasn't looked back since. Vikram is regular columnist with Zend Technologies (creators of PHP), as well as with IBM DeveloperWorks, CNET Builder.com, DevX.com and other OSS sites.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I can't believe there's a better book to start learning PHP with,
By M. P. Newman "Matthew Newman" (Tunbridge Wells, Kent United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
This review is from: PHP: A BEGINNER'S GUIDE (Beginner's Guides (McGraw-Hill)) (Paperback)
I've been fiddling with PHP for more months than I care to admit to and I really wish I'd read this book BEFORE starting that. I also own Mr Vaswani's "How to Do Everything with PHP & MySQL" and had leapt straight into the middle of that book, trying to do my own thing with chunks of code from the book before I really understood what they were doing. To be fair, the code in both these books is really well annotated so that approach worked out successfully. I'm doing considerably better by working through PHP: A BEGINNER'S GUIDE (Beginner's Guides (McGraw-Hill)) from start to finish though. It's written in a way that you can dip in and out of different bits of it but it works particularly well if you go through it from the first to last chapters too.What makes Mr V's writing work so well, in my opinion, is that he's got the balance between dry technical content and humour pretty much perfectly balanced. It seems to me that, modern technical writing, about topics like this, seems to veer to one extreme or another. The author either puts so much focus on filling their tome with accurate and worthy technical content that you need to keep pinching yourself to stay awake as you slog your way through it, or they spend ages trying to be funny and you end up skipping through bits to try and quickly get what you need to know out from amongst the jokes. Mr V seems to steer between these extreme very successfully. This book is very readable. It's written in an empathic manner, where it's obvious that the author has thought about which bits you, the reader, are likely to have found easy or difficult. You'd need to be made of wood not to crack a smile whilst reading this PHP book but the humour rarely gets in the way of learning the code. There are masses of examples in the book, several of which I've adapted, to great effect for various projects. I've got several books where I've worked through the examples only to find that it's really hard to adapt them to do anything other than what they did originally. The opposite appears to be the case with this and the recommended additional reading, mentioned within the book, is well thought out too. If you're relatively new to PHP and are torn between buying this, or another PHP book - buy this one.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent for beginners.,
By
This review is from: PHP: A BEGINNER'S GUIDE (Beginner's Guides (McGraw-Hill)) (Paperback)
You will find this book excellent if you are a beginner. I first bought 'PHP 6 and MySQL 5' ny Larry Ullman because I wanted to do mkore. However it suddenly dawned on me that I was biting more than I can chew. I just could not understand the book because it assumed that I already had the basics of PHP programming. So I lowered myself and purchased this book. It taught me PHP from the ground up. The book's source code can be downloded from the support website.Each chapter starts with the basics and towards the end it delves into real-world projects that apply some of the knowledge you have learnt. At the end of the chapter you find more projects to test how well you can apply what you have learnt. The solutions are provided at the back of the book. There are so many practical projects which are fully answered at the back. These are real world such as averaging marks in a class, Age calculator, Creating a population database. Through the projects the Author shows you how to apply arrays, variables, functions and strings in real world programming. Before I got this book, I had a hard time understanding variable scope in terms of functions. If you are a beginner, this is your book. I don't think it will be useful for those who are already confortable in programming. Now I am using more advanced books, thanks to this book, I am passed PHP basics. Conclusion: Get in now if you want to learn PHP fast and painless.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant,
This review is from: PHP: A BEGINNER'S GUIDE (Beginner's Guides (McGraw-Hill)) (Paperback)
I already had knowledge of HTML and CSS, however was completely new to PHP. I new nothing about it what so ever. This book is brilliant as it starts right from the beginning and builds your knowledge up. It uses helpful examples that you can follow and do yourself. I am now able to build rather a lot in PHP, including a contact form for my website.One downside of it is that before you start you have to download apache/php on your computer, this is fine for those with windows machines as there is a chapter at the back showing you how to do this, however I have a mac so it didnt work for me, I therefore used the internet to learn this and this was fine. I still rate the book 5 star as it really was brilliant! Definately a must buy for anyone seeking to learn php!
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
