View Review Details
| Book: |
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Learning PHP & MySQL |
| Subject: |
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Second Edition? Huh? |
| Date: |
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2008-01-31 18:09:38 |
| From: |
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Derek
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When I received notification from O'Reilly that they were going to replace my copy of Learning PHP & MySQL for free based on the negative feedback received about the first edition, I was pretty excited. I hadn't yet delved into my first edition copy, and so I figured I'd get a nice refresher on PHP and MySQL by waiting to dive into the second edition. Imagine my surprise to find that the second edition is rife with typographical errors, inconsistencies in code examples, and bits of code in entirely wrong places! The command-line MySQL tutorial swaps table and field names between examples, making them awkward to work with, and typos in the code examples ("< strong > ... </ string >") could easily confuse novice web designers. I was finally prompted to write this review when reading the section on "Validating text boxes and text areas" that completely inappropriately reused the code example from the previous section, "Validating checkboxes, radio buttons, and selects".
I generally love O'Reilly books and recommend them readily to people looking for reference guides or tutorials, but I'll definitely be pointing people to other titles (albeit probably other O'Reilly titles) rather than this one for an introduction to PHP and MySQL.
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Re: Second Edition? Huh?, March 26 2008
Submitted by
Tommy Dugandzic
[Respond | View]
I was shocked at the overall low quality of this book considering O'Reillys Perl books were so good. Let me give examples:
On page 249 the author gives an example of how to make the system call "df" in linux and then print the results on a html page. In the 9 lines short example he makes two errors. First he starts the <pre> tag with "</pre>" instead of "<pre>". Ok, that can be obvious for some readers and they can quicly correct it. But then he writes this in the same example:
exec(escapeshellcmd(“df”),$output_lines,$return_value);
echo “$o”;
}
WTF? Considering the very point of his example is to show how to output the contents of a file, his error is not obvious. In one place he calls the variable $output_lines and in the other place he calls it $o. That is not simply a typo.
On page 51 he calls the character "\" backslash, which is correct. On page 52 he suddenly starts calling the character "slash" instead of "backslash". He does that consistently three times on the same page.
If this would have been a story book I would have kept reading anyway if the story would have been good. But these kinds of errors are unacceptable in a book that teaches programming where every letter is crucially important. I make enough errors on my own learning a new programming language. I don't want to guess what errors are mine and what come from the author of the book.
The illustrations that are supposed to help you understand basic concepts such as variables only confuse you. It feels like the author added them afterwards because his boss forced him too, and not because the author really wanted to include any himself.
I read the first 70 pages (I skipped the sections describing how to install PHP and its prerequisites since I already knew how to do that) and I didn't catch even one joke nor pun during that time. I remember the O'reilly Perl books where full of them. Ok, I'll admit humor is not essential to a programming book but it really makes the read so much more enjoyable with clever little puns.
I do not recommend this particular book to anyone. The O'Reilly Perl books and HTML books on the other hand were very, very good. So if you have a few books to choose from I would recommend the O'Reilly one. In general, that is.
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Re: Second Edition? Huh?, July 09 2008
Submitted by
Michele E. Davis |
[Respond | View]
I'd Call It Very Good!
As the co-author of this book I'd like to say the following:
* Yes there are some typographical errors
* The example that illustrates the correct slash, the premise was that the reader would know we meant backslash since the example showed one
* The illustrations are one of the best parts of the book. They are attractive, easy-to-understand, well-rendered, and, lastly, relevant. We did not willy-nilly throw them in, we gave a lot of thought, time, energy and discussion into deciding what should be an illustration and what shouldn't. Keep in mind, as you stated yourself, this is a book for someone who doesn't know these concepts
* We must have missed the memo that said it was necessary to be stand-up comedians to write tech books. Puns are considered bad English. The book had a chatty feel to it, but clever little puns isn't our style.
We're sorry you don't like our style. Your complaints about typo's are dead-on and are being addressed in errata.
