Programmers love its flexibility and speed; designers love its accessibility and convenience. When it comes to creating web sites, the PHP scripting language is truly a red-hot property. In fact, PHP is currently used on more than 19 million web sites, surpassing Microsoft’s ASP .NET technology in popularity. Not surprisingly, this surge in usage has resulted in a number of PHP books hitting the market. Only one, though, takes the language beyond traditional Web programming and into mapping, graphing, multimedia, and beyond: PHP Hacks.
In PHP Hacks, author Jack Herrington wrings out his 20 years of code generation experience to deliver hands-on tools ranging from basic PHP and PEAR installation and scripting to advanced multimedia and database optimizing tricks.
On the practical side of things, PHP Hacks helps you develop more robust PHP applications by explaining how to improve your database design, automate application testing, and employ design patterns in your PHP scripts and classes. In the category of “cool,” Herrington explains how to upgrade your Web interface through the creation of tabs, stickies, popups, and calendars. He even examines how to leverage maps and graphics in PHP. There’s also a bounty of image and application hacks, including those that show you how to:
- Integrate web sites with Google maps and satellite imaging
- Dynamically display iPhoto libraries online
- Add IRC, SMS, and Instant Messaging capabilities to your Web applications
- Drop the latest Wikipedia dictionary onto your Sony PSP
- Render graphics and user interfaces with SVG, DHTML, and Ajax
Whether you’re a newcomer or an expert, you’ll find great value in PHP Hacks, the only PHP guide that offers something useful and fun for everyone.
Customer Reviews
Nice broad book:
Broad book, covers a little html, a little CSS, a little javascript - RSS, XML, MySQL etc. A lot of functional and usefull PHP hacks.
Solid, Quality Reference For Many Possible Uses:
It’s very packed full of php solutions that, instead of having you thinking: “I might need this particularly obscure thing later, but then again probably not”, like a lot of other books, you’ll very likely consider getting a lot of use out of at least 75% of the “hack” recipes eventually.
They’re not really hacks by the way, in the negative sense of the word. (Maybe the Recipes book came out first and “Hacks” was the next best word for the title, who knows). But these hack/tips are based on fundamental technologies such as reading/writing XML, preventing double submission on ecommerce sites, making use of design patterns in PHP, great UI tips ( I immediately put one of them to use, which had a url to a popular dhtml library I didn’t even know of).
A major portion of the hacks involve excellent user interface advice such as dhtml menus, generating images, etc..
Excellent real-world MySQL tips that include a basic login system, or a PHP recipe that you can use over and over to auto-generate sql CRUD (create/read/update/delete) PHP code. And the other way around. Auto-create mysql code from xml files that contain the schema for the tables.
Also recipes that involve basic knowledge in adding a paypal buy button, php unit testing, testing with simulated users. I shouldn’t even attempt at trying to be specific with the types of tips. There are so many of them, varying through different levels of categories
I’d consider it a must-have for all PHP coders. And the reason why I say this, is it’s very likely that you will find value in your situation, in at least 2 or 3 of the included “hacks”, that would easily cancel out the price of the book. But that’s a worst case scenario
Not a tutorial, a reference, or PEAR:
The hacks (PHP scripts) may be good ones, but who is this book for?
If you need to learn PHP, get a tutorial book. There are several. This is NOT one. Strangely, it walks you through installing PHP as if you were a beginner, but then it dives right into the hacks with no real discussion of the language. And there are no details about the lines of script within each hack — you’re essentially being asked to take each hack as a wonderful black box from on high.
If you already know PHP pretty well, then you know you can find nearly an infinite supply of great scripts for free on the web (for example, at PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository). Many of them are updated based on feedback and have detailed explanations and discussions to go along with them. Why pay for a small sampling from a book?
And if you’re a PHP programmer and want a reference book for looking things up quickly, well, this certainly isn’t THAT either.
So I’m again left wondering, who does that leave?
(Edit: I think O’Reilly is a great book company. I own several other O’Reilly books, recommend them highly, and use them all the time. I just have reservations about this particular book’s value given that PEAR is free, has user feedback, and is constantly updated.)
quick “How to’s …”:
When trying to figure out how to implement something, do you ever wish that the examples you find would just ‘cut to the chase’? … skip the theory & just show me a rough idea of how to go about it?
This book contains 100 hacks/recipes, satisfying the above need. Each is 2- 3 pages, which can (mostly) be run right from their folder (~100 folders in the downloaded code samples, of course). A hack-folderName cross-refernece would have been nice, but, hey …
They put you on the track in moments - no need to read the whole book for any hack/recipe - just jump right in (to the problem of your day) … and you can modify/enhance, as your needs dictate.
Code documentation is non-existent and explanation is sparse; but, they do, indeed, satisfy the need for quick examples in 2 - 3 pages!
`lovin it! NICE format …
Great resource:
If you’ve worked with PHP for a while, you probably already know some of the hacks in this book - I did. But it did give me several ideas and I definitely picked up some new tricks and tips from it, so it was worth the buy for me. I love the “hack” books - I always learn something new!
