Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 10 Minutes review

Verdict:

Review Date: 23 Sep 2005

Price when reviewed:

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

PHP is a scripting language for web pages.

It is easy to use, powerful and free, and this accounts for the increasing number of web pages that you encounter that end in .php. It's a viable alternative to both Java and ASP .NET. It's also a server side script so it can integrate with databases on the server.

Linda Barr and Chris Newman's book is a short introduction to PHP - but 10 minutes? Why are Sams' Teach Yourself books, which can be great, always ridiculously optimistic about the time you need to learn any topic?

This book covers the basics and shows you how to master form validation, cookies, user authentication and so on. There is even a chapter on the MySQL open-source database. The book has two parts: language facilities, arrays, classes and control constructs, and applications of the language. We thought essential details of installing PHP were omitted, but it's covered in an appendix. This is the weakest point as far as Windows users are concerned; open-source software can be confusing due to the lack of slick installation procedures.

Still, if you're looking for a pocket guide to PHP, this is a fine choice and it's so up to date it even covers PHP 5.0.

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