I am not a novice programmer, but I am trying to expand the areas of my knowledge. Upon recommendations of others, I have decided to learn PHP and especially how it integrates MySQL. On the shelf at Borders, this looked like an excellent choice. It seemed to be an easy introduction to PHP and promised to provide a balanced discussion of Win, Mac & Linux differences.
Once home I pulled out my MacBook (2007) and went through chapter one and started chapter 2. The issue of installing Apache was simple. It comes pre-installed on Macs. Moving on to installing PHP I skimmed over the 3 pages on Win installation info until I got to this sentence:
"If you are on Mac OS X, you have PHP preinstalled on your computer. You need to edit the Apache Configuration file to enable PHP in much the same way you edited the PC file." [p. 23, para. 4]
That was the entire discussion of installation (or should I say activation) of PHP on a Mac. I flipped back the three pages and put on my rusty Win hat and read the section in detail. I tried to use Spotlight to find "httpd.conf" but to no avail. (Apparently this file is hidden from Spotlight, a small detail the author might have wished to include.) The suggestion that it is "typically found in C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\conf\" was not very help to a Mac user. I spent the next hour and a half looking for the right directories and files with no success. I then thought to look on the O'Reilly site to see if there was an errata sheet that might provide guidance. There was none! However, there were numerous reviews and they were all bad.
I am not going to demand O'Reilly give me my money back. Instead, I'm heading back to Borders right now and return it. Maybe I'll buy one of three other titles that had good reviews (for those looking something else they are PHP Cookbook, Learning PHP5, & Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL.) Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll try one of the other publishers' book. However, the editor who approved this book should be fired.
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