PHP: A BEGINNER'S GUIDE 1st Edition

This book is laid out in a way that makes it easy to cover the material in sequence or to research topics as needs arise. I have had quite a time getting anywhere with PHP and programming in general and have found the explanations for the most part really clear. I wish I had this book when I was taking classes in PHP, it would have clarified a lot for me.

I understand it is a beginners guide but making it halfway through this book I was disappointed that security was not all that key, I think security should be driven from the start, secure accurate code is priority with PHP and when teaching a beginner you need to make them aware of risks of poorly written code. Just because syntax appears correct doesn't always make code secure. Upon finishing this book, I felt it missed a few minor things but still is one of the better guides out there for beginners. I wish there was a bit more about secure code throughout but overall merits 4 stars.

AS EXPECTED

Used to learn programming PHP good book

not helpful:{

Living up to it's name the PHP Complete Reference is a tome of PHP knowledge. With great detail about each (and just about every) PHP function, the book easily warrants the space it takes on your desk. If you are like me you will spend most of your time flipping back into the book to remember the correct order of arguments for in_array or another function.Don't expect to learn anything fancy or exciting, the book covers the functions and the basics. It is also not exactly where you want to learn PHP, but that is where my second book I am reviewing comes in. The book PHP: A Beginner's Guide is the perfect companion to the Complete Reference. What you learn in the Beginner's Guide is backed up and reinforced in the Complete Reference.The Beginner's Guide is really a great starter book for PHP developers, or those who think they will be PHP programmers. The information is provided in usable chunks, but fast enough that the book isn't a boring text book. When paired with the PHP: Complete Reference you will become a better PHP developer in no time at all.

GREAT BOOK AND RECEIVED ON TIME

A very easy to read starter for PHP beginners. Written as a series of tutorials, so not so good as a reference, but I've been able to write some quite nice applications using this book and the online PHP manual. The book tends to jump about a bit, e.g. in Chapter 4 "Working with Arrays", it suddenly starts to discuss "Working with Dates and Times", then there is more about "Working with Dates" in Chapter 11 "Securing PHP". So you need to search for the information you need, at times. Still, overall I would recommend this book for beginners.

This has some good information and it enables you to understand PHP up to a point, but I found too much prior knowledge was assumed and there is a lack of explanation of teh code used as examples. So while I have got some code working, I'm not sure why.

This book presents the information in a logical and progressive manner which is useful for the novice php programmer.The appendix on setting up your own php server was especially useful, enabling web pages to be viewed and debugged without having to go on-line.

The installation guide is utterly useless given that none of the diagrams look anything like the actual installations. Most of the parts of files that the book tells you to edit aren't actually there. This is obviously already incredibly out of date given that other reviewers didn't have this problem. Support from the book's site would be so useful with perhaps updated download links and uploaded installation instructions but the site provides none of this. I have been battling with this for about 12 hours now and will keep going, but so far don't hold up much hope. Given that I have ten years experience as a front end coder with some understanding of php already I wouldn't have expected the installation to be as infuriating.Given that I can't get any of it working on my computer in the first place I can't comment on the rest of the book. It's become a moot point because of the useless installation instructions.