View Review Details
| Book: | Learning PHP and MySQL | |
| Subject: | Disappointing | |
| Date: | 2007-06-03 08:31:34 | |
| From: | Ioan Bach | |
|
I have done some fairly basic web site maintenance in the past but felt that the time had come to investigate all the good things that PHP and MySQL could do for me. I therefore bought this book in the hope and expectation, based on previous experiences with many excellent O'Reilly publications, that it would be class leading. Unfortunately it doesn't measure up. In fairness I started off knowing very little about MySQL and nothing at all about PHP whereas now I am able to utilise some basic elements of both. However I felt really annoyed that the code examples, some of which appear to this beginner to have errors, depend upon Smarty and PEAR being installed. In my view it is perfectly acceptable to mention these add ons - even devote a chapter each to them - but it is more irritating that I can say to find that I cannot really work my way through the examples because of their dependency upon these packages, packages that are not and will not be installed on the server that I have to use. As others have remarked, the writing style is sometimes a little difficult to follow. Some suggestions for the second edition - yes, it does merit a second edition:
Would I recommend this book? It would be hard to do so in its present form. |
||
