February 2004

Book Review: Beginning PHP4 Databases

by Cameron Laird

Beginning PHP4 Databases
by Andrew Hill (Author), Chris Lea, Christopher Scollo, Deepak Thomas, Harish Rawat
Wrox Press, 2002

(Editor's note: We have been unable to find this title on the Wrox site since it was first published. Cameron, however, highly recommends this book so we have provided non-publisher links for more information and sample pages from this title.)

For quite a few UnixReview.com readers, Beginning PHP4 Databases will be the single most valuable book available on development of Web applications. Its flaws are likely to be only minor distractions to those who want to learn more about the PHP programming language or Web-oriented database management. Here's the good and not-so-good about Beginning PHP4 Databases.

Practical database knowledge

Beginning PHP4 Databases is a typical Wrox book: technically accurate, sober, unafraid to tackle difficult topics, clear in its aim, and detailed to the point of crediting specific developers by their correct names. A very capable programmer new to both PHP and databases could use this book to learn both simultaneously. For the most part, though, the reader who'll get the most from it will already have worked quite some time with Web applications and will be able at least to prepare a PHP-coded "Hello, world". While there's early mention that PHP can be used off the Web, Beginning PHP4 Databases leaves everything to do with those possibilities to others.