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Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 book review
Recently Swati from Packt Publishing sent me free copy of Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 book. I was very interested in reading it once because i never took the time to find more about advanced features of the software that i am using almost on day to day basis and second because i was interested to find out how Marc Delisle (author of the book) will go about explaining all the functionality. In my opinion while explaining how to such software it is very easy to fall into trap of teaching people MySQL, rather then teaching how to use the actual software.
Well i have to say, that after reading the book i was nicely surprised. Marc focuses 100% on phpMyAdmin, no unnecessary MySQL or web development lessons is a big plus. One of the things i liked most was chapter about Authentication & Security. Some realy advanced stuff there. Author explains phpMyAdmin configuration options that probably most people (including myself) never heard about, shows how to setup for multi servers and makes some interesting notes about security.
Next, there are chapters explaining phpMyAdmin core functionality: creating databases, selecting data, manipulating data, modifying tables and so on. Probably everyone who ever worked with phpMyAdmin did not need to know that stuff as it’s very intuitive, but what i liked about it was that here and there Marc drops tips and hints that depending on what you are doing might improve your work.
Like with everything there are more advanced features that come into core functionality and this are: Relational system and multi table operations, everything with big enough screen shoots. Actually screen shoots in each chapter are big plus for whole book they contain only important information and are big enough to see all the details.
One thing i did not like was chapter about export, where Marc explains how to export data to many different formats (csv, pdf, excel, word, latex, xml, ods, odt, yaml codegen and few more). In my opinion just a few formats would be good enough.
All in all it’s a good book, pretty well written with nice screen shoots (like i already mentioned), really informative and straight to the point, just as i like it. I rate it 9/10.
If you are still not sure about this book you can grab free chapter here
Posted in ReviewsBy Greg
Advanced AJAX best practices (book review)
Actual book title that is reviewed here is Advanced Ajax: Architecture and Best Practices by Shawn M. Lauriat. However better title for this book would be advanced JavaScript, because – well let’s face it AJAX is just one class, so there wouldn’t be much to write about wouldn’t it?
Posted in ReviewsBy Greg
Zend Studio Eclipse Project
I was never a big fan of commercial software. It all changed when i started my first job and saw ZendStudio 5.5. I was amazed by it. I had no idea that IDE can make so much difference in PHP programming and i was not even using 50% of features that this software offers to the programmer. When i heard that Zend Studio 6 will be based on PDT a plugin for Eclipse IDE i was interested in the outcome. The results are well … read further to find out.
Posted in ReviewsBy Greg
Developing Webbots, Spiders and Screen Scrapers with PHP cURL
For a long time i wanted to write detailed tutorial on how to use PHP and cURL to create bots and i am still going to do that, but while browsing Amazon i found very interesting book related to this topic A Guide to Developing Internet Agents with PHP/CURL
In my opinion knowing how to create web bots is one of the most important web programmer skills, there is so much data on the internet that we need bots to take full adventage of the resources on the web and automate day to day boring online tasks. More over you will be surprised how often you will be asked on job interview if you can write a webbot.
Posted in ReviewsBy Greg
