PHP: The Good Parts [Kindle Edition]

O'Reilly's "The Good Parts" series began with Crockford's outstanding "JavaScript: The Good Parts," which established a very high standard for a book claiming to detail the good parts of a technology. In "The Good Parts," Crockford detailed a great many things that were fundamentally wrong in the definition and practice of JavaScript and how it was possible to carefully use a well-chosen subset of the language, "the good parts" to achieve more professional results.

If there's any modern programming language that's more synonymous with bad architecture and poor real-world practices than JavaScript, it's PHP. The top tier of PHP programmers acknowledge this and work in environments that rigorously enforce coding standards meant to protect them from the bad parts of PHP.

I turned to "PHP: The Good Parts" with the hopes that it might detail these kinds of standards and practices. Instead, I found a through-the-looking-glass view into a cheerleader world where PHP is "nothing but good" and the author is at a loss to think of anything wrong with the language.

One could blame this on the author, but I'm inclined to blame it on the publisher. O'Reilly, did you really not know that you had something special going with "the good parts" and that the title promised a book by a master showing the benefit of a lot of experience? Or, did you cynically think that the general level of PHP programming expertise is so low that nobody would notice the difference?

"The Good Parts" series, as established by Douglas Crockford, set a high standard that helped any JavaScript developer move up one or more levels in their craft by gaining a clear understanding of what was good _and bad_ about JavaScript. As an experienced JS developer with over a decade of pure JavaScript experience I found almost nothing to criticize about that book and was reminded of a few subtleties I'd forgotten over the years. It was a perfect refresher for me and a great introduction for anyone less experienced in what to avoid.

This book does nothing of the sort.

Unlike JavaScript, I'm completely new to PHP. I've never written a single line of the stuff. Going on the basis of my experience with Crock's book I had hoped to get a useful introduction to PHP and a clear view of the minefield that experienced programmers realize exists in every language. This book blew smoke in every direction; the author even wasted my time by claiming he couldn't really think of any bad parts. I wish I'd seen that comment when scanning the book in the bookstore, I could have saved myself a lot of time and $.

From a pure beginner perspective simple things like the '.' operator for string concatenation are never explained, they just start appearing in code samples. In terms of language introduction there's fragmented coverage of the core language constructs, scattered coverage of basic string and array functions with no summaries or API/signature examples, and no coverage of generally accepted PHP coding standards (the samples in the book don't use "fully bracketed ifs" for example). I don't feel like reading this book allows me to do anything other than go in search of another introductory book on PHP armed with some idea of what _not_ to buy.

If I were an experienced PHP programmer I can't imagine I would have found anything of value in this book. The language coverage is so basic I presume it's common knowledge to anyone who's used PHP for any period of time. At the same time there are no minefield topics worth discussing with the possible exception of the discussion around the admittedly questionable decision to add 'goto' to PHP 5.3.

As someone who's done OO development in a half-dozen other languages I'd have to say Chapter 6, on OO in PHP, should be torn out and run through a shredder. It's the worst coverage of OO I think I've ever seen in print. Unfortunately, subsequent chapters refer to Chapter 6 as if it taught you something that you'd need to know.

All in all this book has to be one of the worst O'Reilly titles I've ever read...and I've read over 100 over the years. Admittedly ORA has been disappointing me more and more often in recent years, but not all of what's wrong with this book can be laid at the publisher's feet.

Perhaps this is all just a reaction to expectations set by the title which were completely unmet. Consider yourself warned however. If you think this book is going to give you the same meaty-yet-concise treatment of PHP that Crock did for JS you're going to be very disappointed.

The author clearly never read Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts, or at least if he did he missed the point entirely. Crockford's book served as a map to guide you through the best ways to use Javascript without falling into pitfalls. Javascript, a language programmers have been raised to detest due to shoddy examples abusing the worst parts of the language, started to see its reputation turn around when Crockford's book hit the shelves. Crockford made a strong case that underneath it's Bad Parts lie a beautiful language that programmers can find joy in.

No such case is made in this book. In fact, a good chunk of this book is dedicated to building some project involving an SMS gateway instead of talking about the language semantics that make PHP what it is. The author's claim that he doesn't think there are any Bad Parts to PHP (in the "Bad Parts" appendix) shows he has not worked with many other programming langauges, if any, than PHP. I have a hard time believing the choice for the title of this book was meant for any reason other than to sucker people in (like myself) who loved Crockford's book and expected a similar "clean slating" for the other much loathed language of the web, PHP.

I was hoping for an in-depth discussion of the details of the language, the design choices its author made, and how to avoid common traps when writing PHP code. I wanted to see what functions and constructs to avoid, and what patterns were common enough to use idiomatically. Instead what I got was a basic introduction to the simplest concepts in the language ("Objects" being the epic crescendo of this grand tour) and many pages of rambling on about some SMS project. I would have read through it in more detail if it weren't for the author's ridiculously bad security through obscurity advice peppered throughout, which I'll spare him the pain of seeing reprinted here.

If you want to learn PHP, pick up another book. If you want someone to dissect the language for you and tell you how to write Good PHP instead of Bad, well, I guess we'll just have to wait for that book to be written. It's a shame someone has already taken the title it'll need.