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Webmaster Book Store > Webmaster books beginning with O
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Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5: Learn to leverage PHP5's OOP features to write manageable applications with ease |
Author: Hasin Hayder
Published: 2007-12-30 |
List price: $39.99
Our price: $35.99
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As of: January 08th, 2009 08:08:48 AM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Sloppy Book, Sloppy Code?
I set out to write a scathing review of this book after wasting money on it. Instead, I took some time to collect my thoughts before actually committing words to the page. I wish the author of this book had done the same.
The "English" used in this book could only barely be called such. For a native English speaker such as myself, the overly-familiar, almost childlike approach to prose that the author has adopted is very distracting. There are blatant errors in the book, and that's not nit-picking; the book probably averages a glaring error every couple of pages. I don't claim to be the world's most polished author, but I'd want to re-write this book cover-to-cover before I'd ever try reading it again.
The coding "standards" professed in this book are horrible for beginning coders, and make little sense. They don't follow any of the accepted "major" PHP standards, and seem to be an amalgamation of non-PHP languages and basic object-oriented principles.
The book does a terrible job of introducing any level of programmer to object-oriented design ideas. Although OOP is one of the most difficult concepts to teach to another person, this book is NOT the place you want to start if you're just picking it up. I am an experienced OO coder and the book had my head spinning with its contradictions, erroneous information, and terrible analogies. The code examples are poorly written snippets of barely functional code in many cases. I'm not sure where Packt Publishing got the idea that this author was even remotely qualified to write this book, but if their "About the Author" section is any indication, no one at the publishing house writes English very well, either.
I am really trying not to be as harsh as I could be here, but I will say that it's questionable whether this book went through ANY level of editorial review. Sure, the author is from Bangladesh, but if there was a language barrier involved, couldn't someone have translated the book into slightly more passable English? I don't know if Packt Publishing is a "vanity" publishing house that doesn't have editors, but I will definitely stay FAR away from their books in the future. In my opinion, you should do the same with THIS book. There are far better books on the subject, and you'd only be wasting your money on this one.
 Great book to catch up on OOP in PHP
So as some of you already know, in my venture to keep up on the development community and trends, I have started to review books for Packt Publishing. They have sent me a few books to read and review, and I will be posting them to my blog for everyone to read. I have picked books from them that I believe are topics worth exploring and actually reading from a book (and not just finding a resource online).
The first book that was delivered is the one that this post is dedicated to. Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 by Hasin Hayder was picked to go over what I believe to be the base of successfully programming in PHP. Object oriented programming is not an option anymore when working in this business. So if you have been stuck as a procedural programming in PHP it's time to remedy that and apply some new (well not really new) techniques and master the language.
Hayder begins the book off with exactly that, discussing and demonstrating the differences between Procedural PHP and Object Oriented PHP. I believe this knowledge to be essential to start your OO voyage. Pay attention to examples in this chapter as they give some good feedback on what cases OO is necessary. Hayder also explains the differences between PHP4 and PHP5's OO approach for anyone who has PHP4 systems still in play. After that Chapter 2 goes into the nitty gritty basics of using OOP in PHP, including a sections on using interfaces and abstract classes.
The next chapter that sparked some interest is the chapter on Design Patterns, including some of my favorites: Singleton Pattern, Lazy Loading, and Adaptor Pattern. This is a must read if you will be developing frameworks or working with some of the more modern frameworks like Zend Framework. Here at NFi Studios we do framework development on top of Zend and commonly use some of these patterns.
Another hot topic over at work is Unit Testing, which is covered briefly in Chapter 5, I recommend reading this chapter and checking out the section on TDD (Test Driven Development), and the brief section on PHPUnit. I do however wish this section was a little bigger, but this is a book on OOP and I guess I could get a book on Unit Testing later on.
Other topics covered in this book include PDO (which is a database staple of Zend Framework), XML and MVC (which is the most popular architectural pattern in the PHP web development world). The books strong points are its definitions of OO concepts and examples given about them. So if you have a brief understanding of Object Oriented Programming but don't understand all of the concepts, this book is for you.
For a good yet shorter read on PHP techniques using OOP I recommend this book. It gives you a good synopsis of big topics and gives you the ability to dive into bigger more complex books and some of the web resources and API's out there.
[...]
 Don't Buy
The author is obviously not comfortable with the English language, and not from a teaching background. The book has frequent errors, is not easy reading and just plain is not a book that is easy to learn from - maybe not even possible to learn from. I've taught myself over a dozen programming languages from books and I am a competent PHP programmer who just wants to add OOP style, yet this book was useless to me.
Same as the documentation...but as interpreted by a non english speaker and with less examples
Read the php online docs instead, their examples are much better explained. What do you expect from a book with a clipart flower on the cover? Cheaply produced, outsourced, and spammzor'ed to everyone registered in the stupid php classes website.
Great book for all PHP users!
I have looked at a lot of books relating to OOP and PHP, and Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 is the first to clearly explain PHP and OOP, and how they worked together. This book explains concepts in a way that is easily understood. Hasin Hayder writes the concepts in a very clear to understand method and gives plenty of working examples of each concept.
The book is great for people who are new to the concept of OOP in PHP, or those who know PHP OOP and just need a refresher. The book covers the basics, reminds us of certain practices that are considered best, and those practices that are often forgotten.
Hasin covers the concepts of XML and MySQLi with regard to their use in the OOP world. The XML chapter is amazing! After reading through it I was able to understand and effectively use SimpleXML and the DOMDocument to manipulate XML with ease in PHP5.
Another strong point of the book is it's introduction and explanation of MVC and what it is, how it is used, and some of the more popular MVC frameworks for PHP. This chapter was particularly interesting to me as I am always looking for ways to develop better, faster, stronger applications and this overview of MVC Frameworks made it clear the path to be taken.
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