PHP Solutions: Dynamic Web Design Made Easy

The Best Taught PHP Book Ever Written

Having been a teacher, an engineer, and a computer scholar, I have been looking for a long time for a book, like this, that could teach a new area of programming with true elegance and style. I'm sure that you have encountered the usual run of books that propose to cover some form of programming and have glowing reviews only to find out that the author is disorganized or delivers a spotty coverage of the subject. These disappointing attempts leave the reader hungering for ever more sources to fill the gaping subject void or explain the subject in some understandable format.

Here is the way PHP or any other programming subject should be taught and its about time. The organization of the book is very well organized and defined for teaching. The explanations are comprehensive and the supporting code is clear and to the point. Up to this point in time I couldn't find a book on PHP that indicated that PHP could be competent in managing images. Yet, any website that doesn't show images with style is reviled by reviewers everywhere. I have seen several books on PHP 4,5,6 and MySQL that didn't have one usable image in any of their five hundred pages. I almost deceided that ASP.NET and Silverlight were the only competent web development systems because of this.

The reign of table oriented web design books is now over. PHP Solutions has three full chapters covering the access and placement of images. It shows elegant management of images on dozens of pages. And it displays the organization of a website that shows both beauty and intelligent design. Forget the others, this is the only book that you should use to introduce PHP.

PHP Solutions is composed of six basic sections. In the first section chapters 1 through 3 coves the introduction and installation of PHP. Section two has two chapters covering script writing and organizing scripts into include files for code reuse. Internal variables and usage are displayed here. Section three includes chapters five, six and seven which covers form design and the use of file uploading and management to give the website its characteristic look and feel. Section four spans chapters eight and nine cover thumbnail image programming and multi-page forms to hold the images. Chapter nine also introduces the unifying idea of the session. This concept is used to solidify the behavior and persistant memory of the website. Section five holding chapters ten, eleven, and twelve cover the use of the MySQL database to hold dynamic web content such as images and supporting information. This is where the meat of the book is located. Finally, section six in chapters thirteen finishes up the website development process by showing how to deal with typical problem issues. In the last chapter the book details how to apply web security to the design package and deliver a fully professional design.

My first PHP books can now be retired and I can put this one on the shelf instead. Now I feel that I truely understand how to use PHP in a professional manner. I can now give my clients the complete feature comparison between using PHP and ASP. I can give a great recommendation for this book knowing that the complete picture of PHP is now displayed before us all. After reading this book I can say that I like PHP as a website script much better than before. It is worth every one of the five stars that I have given the book. I'm going to have fun developing PHP websites from now on.

4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

3 weeks and I was building with no prior html knowledge

If you diligently read and follow the steps, then you will quickly learn the building blocks and be on your way. In following the steps I learned how to build a login, register, picture gallery(this book handles picture implementation well, a hard find in other books)and more.

* I recommend installing WAMP, it was a quick and easy install and it includes both apache(executes php code) and mysql(database).

My Main PC Book, Updated

I'm about to start a new PHP project for our university website and was going to do it with the first edition of Dave Powers's PHP Solutions at my elbow. Now it will be the second edition. I have other PHP books and may dip into them a bit, but this is the one that will see me through. It seems that Powers came to computer guru-dom from a career in broadcast journalism, and it shows in his ability to present exactly the information I need in exactly the way I need it. I'm a fairly experienced user-developer, but not a technical person. Powers is a wizard and at the same time a first-rate "host" to the reader. He understands the difference between making an explanation ALMOST confusion-free and getting it just right. His writing style pleasantly engages you on grown-up terms, with no static of jokiness to cut through. As for content, PHP Solutions is, as the title declares, a solution-oriented approach to getting things done with PHP, not a ground-up tutorial or a dictionary-like reference. But I find that the challenges and solutions Powers has assembled amount to an important part of what I want to get done on a project. You can learn PHP basics anywhere (although Powers gives you a refresher in those, too) and then, when it comes to putting a particular capability into your website, turn to this book for the solution. For example, when I look at the code I wrote for my course-management system to display a list of students' reports with short extracts in screens of ten students each, I find the following comment: // *** Prepare for paging through query results, displaying a specified number //of records on the page and inserting a record-navigation system above and //below the records. This is a heavily modified adaptation and combination of //techniques from PHP Solutions by David Powers. I write comments like that because I have to remember what parts of "my system" might need attribution if I describe it in an academic paper. The one above refers to the first edition of PHP Solutions, which brings us to an important point. I was working in PHP 4 at the time and dreading the move to PHP 5. Dave Powers took care of me at my own level but also showed how things could be done the newer way, thereby getting me started on the road to transition. If you're coming to PHP Solutions now, in the new edition, be aware that PHP 4 is a THING OF THE PAST -- and be glad! You shouldn't invest time and headaches in writing it at this date. Note the following from the introduction to the book: "If you're in hurry or are daunted by the prospect of building class definitions, you can simply use the finished files. However, I encourage you to explore the class definitions. The code will teach you a lot of PHP that you'll find useful in other situations." Right. I started out pasting useful code snippets years ago but found that while it was the first step in learning the code, it was also the first step in a mess that I couldn't untangle when things didn't quite work. Do learn the lessons that Powers makes so learnable. They'll have you writing reusable code, and you'll understand how to deploy it. Still, you don't want to struggle with every last keystroke in making it run -- and that, of course, is why you want a book of solutions. So it's great having solid, tested examples to go from. Great, too, that the new edition of my main PC (not only PHP) book comes just in time for my new project.

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