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Upgrading to PHP 5

By Adam Trachtenberg
July 2004
Pages: 348
ISBN 10: 0-596-00636-5 | ISBN 13: 9780596006365
(Average of 4 Customer Reviews)

Description

This book is targeted toward PHP developers who are already familiar with PHP 4. Upgrading to PHP 5 offers a concise appraisal of the differences between PHP 4 and PHP 5, a detailed look at what's new in this latest version, and an explanation of how these changes affect you. The book also covers more advanced features and provides hands-on experienced through short, sample programs included throughout.
Full Description

If you're using PHP 4, then chances are good that an upgrade to PHP 5 is in your future. The more you've heard about the exciting new features in PHP 5, the sooner that upgrade is probably going to be. Although an in-depth, soup-to-nuts reference guide to the language is good to have on hand, it's not the book an experienced PHP programmer needs to get started with the latest release. What you need is a lean and focused guide that answers your most pressing questions: what's new with the technology, what's different, and how do I make the best use of it? In other words, you need a copy of Upgrading to PHP 5. This book is targeted toward PHP developers who are already familiar with PHP 4. Rather than serve as a definitive guide to the entire language, the book zeroes in on PHP 5's new features, and covers these features definitively. You'll find a concise appraisal of the differences between PHP 4 and PHP 5, a detailed look at what's new in this latest version, and you'll see how PHP 5 improves on PHP 4 code. See PHP 4 and PHP 5 code side-by-side, to learn how the new features make it easier to solve common PHP problems. Each new feature is shown in code, helping you understand why it's there, when to use it, and how it's better than PHP 4. Short, sample programs are included throughout the book. Topics covered in Upgrading to PHP 5 include:

The new set of robust object-oriented programming features
An improved MySQL extension, supporting MySQL 4.1, prepared statements, and bound parameters
Completely rewritten support for XML: DOM, XSLT, SAX, and SimpleXML
Easy web services with SOAP
SQLite, an embedded database library bundled with PHP 5
Cleaner error handling with exceptions
Other new language features, such as iterators, streams, and more.

Upgrading to PHP 5 won't make you wade through information you've covered before. Written by Adam Trachtenberg, coauthor of the popular PHP Cookbook, this book will take you straight into the heart of all that's new in PHP 5. By the time you've finished, you'll know PHP 5 in practice as well as in theory.

Featured customer reviews

Excellent!, August 29 2005

Rating:

Submitted by ACS [Respond | View]

I was impressed by the clarity and conciseness of this little book. It was a pleasure to read and I had no problems identifying the places that I did not have to read on the first reading, or that were related to PHP 4 and did not need to study fully.

The examples about PHP 4 (that are then recreated in PHP 5) are carefully chosen to explain how the new language makes things easier and/or more effective and modular with PHP 5. This didactic device is very useful for people that have worked extensively on PHP 4.

This is clearly not a book for people that are just begining on PHP or for those that have little experience on PHP 4. It is better for them to learn from a PHP 5 book (Learning PHP 5 maybe?) directly. However I'd recommend anyone on that situation to then come back and give this book a careful look since many topics are explained here better than in many other places in the literature.

I was especially fond of the chapters on XML, Iterators, and Streams and Wrappers. However all the other chapters were very helpful and I can see myself coming back many times in the future for clarifications on fine point on OO programming, MySQLi, or Error Handling.

One of the best O'Reilly books I own.

i liked a lot, February 01 2005

Rating:

Submitted by Francesco [Respond | View]

As I haven't had any regular computer programming studies, this book which doesn't take anything for granted was perfetct for me.

I liked more: the mysql chapter, XML and error handling. But also very very good is chapter 10 (PHP in action): a small programming example.

I liked also the smaller size: 15x23 cm versus 18x23.5, which is more comfortable for people who read it in train.

Concise and to the point, January 24 2005

Rating:

Submitted by hooda [Respond | View]

I purchased this book as I was using PHP 4 books to lean how to program PHP 5.

The chapters that caused me to make the purchase were on OOP. It was the best PHP 5 OOP overview I have seen. A bit concise, but covered all the ground I wanted in as few pages as possible.

This is not an exhaustive reference, nor a hand holding tutorial. However it does provide enough clear background on the new features that the PHP documentation starts to make sense.

Thanks for a great book.

hooda

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Disapointing, November 08 2004

Rating:

Submitted by dunxd [Respond | View]

Disapointing. The book seems confused, often spending more time telling you about PHP4 workarounds than the PHP5 way of doing things (Should it have been called Downgrading to PHP4?).

Examples are not clearly labelled, meaning that if you dip into this book you may end up applying these PHP4 methods when the whole point is to avoid them. Chapters are very poorly organised, meaning you aren't going to want to sit down and read it.

I found the chapter on OOP particularly confusing. The discussion of constructors and destructors was scattered around the chapter, as was the discussion of public, private and protected methods and properties. Code examples weren't clearly PHP4 or PHP5, either through labelling, the context in the text, and worst of all many that seemed to be examples of PHP4 use mysqli functions that aren't available in PHP4.

Sorry, but this book feels like a dud to me. O'Reilly should be updating Programming PHP and the PHP Pocket Reference, rather than selling this book.

My copy is on the way back to Amazon.

Media reviews "The overall tone of the book is one of a senior programmer showing you the ropes...The tone helps to make the text a bit more personal, but at the same time it doesn't get caught up in jargon and makes sure that each explanation remains clear...If you are a PHP programmer then this text will probably hit the mark, giving you the jump on PHP 5 you need without wasting your time covering the stuff you already know."
--Paul Schneider, PhD, KickStartNews.com, August 2004

"I own a sizable collection of O'Reilly books and have found them to in general be very well written and useful. Upgrading to PHP 5 continues this tradition superbly...this text covers the changes in PHP 5 in detail in a surprisingly brief 300 pages (and small page footprint). A worthy addition to a book collection, provided you already have general PHP reference available."
--Conrad Shultz, Amazon.com review, July 2005

"If you're looking for a guide to help you get up to speed on PHP 5 and you already know PHP 4 then this is the book you'll want. Adam sticks to the O'Reilly formula and his knowledge of PHP is second to none."
--Chrispian Burks, WebDevReviews.com, November 2004

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