Some time ago nice people from Packt Publishing sent me review copy of Expert PHP 5 Tools book written by Dirk Merkel. The book has 437 pages, so it took me a while to read it and create a review.

My first impression is that book was created mainly for advanced users, there is no place for teaching reader PHP programming, author assumes your skilled enough to get thru it and understand the source, more over the book is not that much about programming itself. So what’s it about? I think that statement from the cover page sums it nicely “Proven enterprise development tools and best practices for designing and deploying PHP applications”.

First two chapters are about source code: coding standards and documentation with PHPDoc. Basically if you read Zend Framework coding standards, you can skip at least first of this chapters. I also had quite strange feeling that author implies that only “his” coding standards are the only good ones – which is well … not true.

From the chapter 3 we get to the nuts and bolts of the book … expert tools. First one is Eclipse with PDT extension. If phrase Integrated Development Environment (or IDE) tells you nothing you should really check out this chapter. Using IDE is one of the easiest ways to improve your development speed and Dirk explains exactly how to do it.

Chapter four is all about SVN. If you are not using yet some version control system this chapter is a great way to get you started … and by the way, if you are not using version control you are shooting yourself in the foot. Chapter five covers debugging (mainly) with XDebug. I liked it. I did not realize that there are so many options available in XDebug.

Chapter 6 is about PHP Frameworks, it describes briefly some of the most popular frameworks and than focuses on the Zend Framework, i find it as nice and detailed introduction to ZF. Next chapter is about Unit Tests. I have to admit i was never a big fan of unit testing, but if you want to learn how to do it the right way this chapter will do it for you.

Last three chapters (8, 9, 10) are about automation in terms of: application deployment, design and development. Automation is one of the best thing you can do for your application, the less human interaction is needed for deployment the smaller are chances of making a mistake. I think that deployment is one of the most important “things” any developer does (especially if you are just updating live sites) so i guess that every professional developer should take some time to read about it.

Despite there were parts i didn’t liked that much i find this book very informative and innovative in a way that author presented how PHP applications/software should be developed. I think that if you have your programming skills nailed down “Expert PHP 5 Tools” book is a natural step to become a better developer.

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

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? Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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 written by Mike Schrenk. I did not read this book yet, but it looks very promising and interesting … atleast to me, because it is not yet-another-php-for-beginners, but a book that focuses and deeply explores one single topic – creating webbots.

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. Read the rest of this entry »