126 of 139 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
ORA Cookbook Vs. WROX Solutions, 16 Dec 2002
By Kevin Peach - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: PHP Cookbook: 1 (Paperback)
I ordered a copy of the "PHP Cookbook ORA", along with a copy of the "Professional PHP 4 web Development Solutions WROX". Upon reading both these books, i thought i should offer a honest review comparing the two:
Both the books were informative in their own right
o The ORA book had small snippets of code based solutions (very similar to the PHP Developers cookbook from Sterling and Andrei) that are very useful for programmers who are confounded with small to medium coding problems. However, there was nothing enterprising about the coverage, that one could not achieve from using a combination of the online docs + mailing lists. Another downside was that i could not find full solutions that i could re-use in my projects.
On the Other hand, i found
o The WROX book offered complete solutions to real world problems - a Simple/advanced CMS (the core of which you can plug into your site), a simple search engine, a classified ads board, and lots of cool creative case study solutions that i could extend to use in my hobby sites. The content was very enterprising and all of the solutions presented are the most popular one's amongst web developers these days. More interesting is that these solutions can be completely re-used and extended into your projects. However, the downside of this book is that you would need to have prior PHP knowledge either picked up from WROX' Professional PHP 4 (as is mentioned as a pre-requisite in the book) or from the Programming PHP ORA, or any another competent professional PHP programming books in the market.
So the bottomline is:
oCare for an appetiser - Pick up the ORA book.
oCare for a full meal - Pick up the Wrox book.
I am posting this same review for both the books (so customers can benefit from it). However, i have ranked the Wrox book, a notch above this one, simply because i wanted a burp:-)
27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A very good "cookbook" reference, 14 Oct 2003
By Todd E Smith - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: PHP Cookbook: 1 (Paperback)
I have been programming PHP for a couple of years, and have lots of books on the subject. IMHO, I felt like this book serves the role of a "cookbook" very nicely. The contents are organized by language function via chapters (i.e. strings, numbers, arrays, regex, forms, classes, db, security, XML, etc...) which makes it convenient to find what you are looking for. Within each chapter, are very specific "Problem" and "Solutions" which contain simple code snippets (like 10 lines or less) and a description of what it does. Most problems are solved within one page. It is really concise and to the point. The index is comprehensive so it is straightforward to lookup the issue you are having, find the problem / solution and get on with your coding. You don't have to read thru lots of code or descriptions of why somebody setup a display template or complicated object. Look up your problem, read a quick solution, and BOOM, you're done and back to implementing it in your code.
I have read some other reviews for this book here that recommend the Wrox book, stating this one is too simple. I don't agree with this. The Wrox book appears to me to be another "... let's show you a bunch of full blown application examples ..." book to me, similar to the classic Welling and Thomson SAMS published text. The "cookbook" will not teach you the language, nor is that its intent; it assumes you know what you are doing.
This book is exactly what it says it is, a cookbook. If you need a quick solution to specific coding problems, at a fairly advanced level, it is a really good reference.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Highly recommened for web developers with basic/intermediate, 3 Dec 2003
By Juergen - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: PHP Cookbook: 1 (Paperback)
If you are completely new to PHP, just forget about this book!
If you are looking for complete programming solutions, do so as well!
However, if you have some basic experience with PHP and MySQL this book is just great.
This book deserves the word "cookbook" as it contains over 600 pages of receipts (do not expect big explanations, but just snippets of code), which will help you to solve many problems. And the best of this book - in my personal opinion - is, that by reading it, you will find a lot of problems/solutions/ideas you have not thought about before.
Be warned: This book is not a real "help" for anybody who looks for the easy solution, but it will definitely help YOU to develop your site and develop yourself.
Just buy it - it's well worth the money and if this book won't pay out, none will!