The Joy of PHP: A Beginner's Guide to Programming Interactive Web Applications with PHP and mySQL

I'm fairly new to PHP, and I bought this book as a companion to other PHP courses and tutorials I'm taking. The author writes clearly and the book is built around building a "pretend" project, a used car website. This was the most valuable part for me, as other courses I've taken show you how to write a function or create variables without much context. Moving along with the project was extremely helpful to understanding the code.In each chapter, the author lays out the entire code, then explains it line by line. You can also download the code for free on his website if you just want to see it in action, or compare it to your own to find errors you've made (which is mostly what I did).I made it more challenging for myself because I decided to build my own project that used the concepts in the book. So rather than following along exactly, I colored outside the lines. That made it challenging at times, but I learned more that way.There are some typos throughout the book as others have mentioned. For someone new to PHP that can be confusing because it takes a while to know that something is wrong. However, through searching online I was able to figure things out. Some code in the book is now deprecated, but since we don't live in Harry Potter world where books update themselves, and code is constantly evolving, it makes sense that will happen.The author has been very receptive to questions from me, so when I ran into some issues he responded fairly quickly and helped me through them. That alone is worth more than the price of the book.If you want to learn PHP, this is a great book to help you build something practical in PHP. You need to go in prepared to do some work to truly understand what the code is doing. Try things out on your own. The best way to learn is to mess around with the code the author gives you, screw things up, then solve the problem.

I bought this book as im learning PHP from scratch this december. I have good knowledge of HTML, CSS and a bit of JS. I've been watching some great tutorials by tuts on youtube but some of them where too advanced and I decided to buy a book to help me get better on this in a professional way to then continue to watch his videos, now here it goes:I'm the kind of guy that will write himself and execute each line of code on the book, play with it, test it.This is just full of mistakes, poor explanations, typos. Overall it really looks to me that someone copy/pasted comments from stack overflow and someone else's work and put them all together in a mediocre way, designed a nice book cover and said: let's sell this and make money.The potential for the book was amazing if written by someone who actually cares about it and wanted to teach with high level of detail. The irony is that this is for beginners, so a careless beginner will think all of this is right and give it a high rating....Disappointed as it has been long since this book is out and it could have been fixed, showing the intentions of improving it.I will ask for a refund, even though it's just 4$ I believe i paid, I prefer to give it to another author that at least shows a real desire to teach the right way.If the author improves his work I will gladly change my review. If not, then, don't waste your money.

So many books seem to want to front-load a bunch of theory about for loops and how many bytes a certain statement might take up. Generally, I understand the concepts, but part of me yearns to "get my hands dirty", as I find I feel disconnected from true understanding. I don't care if it's the simplest thing, I want to start "doing" something, and this is where this book really shines.Alan Forbes gives a very practical education on PHP. Right away, he has you set up a virtual server, and quickly moves you into a practical example setting up a database for a used car lot. It's down to Earth, approachable, and teaches the exact concepts that I was looking for in PHP.I'm about half way through the book and in a little more than a week, I've begun coding in PHP, using a virtual server, and created mySQL databases! whereas with some of the thicker, encyclopedic tomes that I have, I'd still be trudging through snippets of unrelated code, still not knowing what I'm actually supposed to do with it. This is one of those books that makes you feel that PHP is possible for a beginner to use.There are a few minor drawbacks, but they don't take away at all from the great value of this book.The first is the editing (I have the 2015 edition). The code works, but every now and then I find a minor typo like on pg. 87 line 36 (no opening tag) and like pg. 89 line 7 (where he creates a variable called $mysqli and in the explanation refers to it as $con (which messed me up for a bit trying to figure out where $con was)). The book sometimes makes reference to color highlighted code, but the printing is black and white. Some pictures are missing. For example pg. 101 he says, your table "should look like this:" and there is a space with no picture.The next thing is that I felt a little bit like I was tossed in the deep end pretty quickly. He went from some simple concepts to a 79 line program pretty quickly. It felt a little overwhelmed, but going through his line-by-line explanation a few times, I finally began picking up the concepts, and when I finally got to the end of the first program, I really felt like I had a decent handle on what was going on. It was an abrupt way to begin, but by the end I felt like I got a lot out of it.If you're thinking about buying this book, I would recommend it as a companion book to learning PHP as a whole. Luckily for me, I had been messing around with JavaScript for a few weeks prior to picking up this book, and understood some of the concepts of OOP. Alan Forbes quickly introduces these topics, but doesn't go in depth on them.Where the book really shines is in its practical introduction to PHP. The examples are great, and Alan Forbes breaks them down line by line to tell you exactly what the code is doing. Well worth the purchase price since I feel like I actually learned something.Thank you Alan Forbes!

This book stumbles early on to fulfil the brief of a 'beginner's' introduction to a programming and would benefit hugely from the critical-but-friendly eye of an editor.The lack of chapter numbers in the table of contents, although a minor, unnecessary features, hints at the general sense of disorganisation that rapidly emerges in the pages that follow.The Joy of PHP turns to Sadness of PHP on p24, where it advises installing Docker.I installed Docker. The engine 'failed to load up'. On p25, it advises creating a file called 'Docker' but doesn't say what file type it should be, which is the first thing anyone coming from writing other easy code such as html, css, and javascript will expect. It turns out Dockerfile doesn't need an extension - but this should be explicit in the book, and it should be explicit that it's a file type produced by the Docker programme. There's no reason to assume otherwise.The typo of 'docker-comose.yml' (SIC) only adds to the sense of stumbling into a messy, unpleasant bramble.'Container'? Like an html container? No explanation given. A thicket of jargon.P24's offer of skipping ahead 'to the next section' is imprecise - to which section? Does that mean the next long paragraph, the next bold subhead, or the next chapter - the sense of which is still feels unclear after the absence of chapter numbers in the table of contents.It also looks like there's no 'Docker Community Version' for download anymore, it's simply Docker Desktop.And it doesn't work.Its engine failed to load.It's directed me to some complicated instructions to install a kernel for Linux. I don't even want Linux.It's been a waste of time.The p28 arrives and WampServer appears from nowhere, like Zorro, but it's not clear why. Is this essential or optional or an alternative to Docker?This is a book that desperately needs an editor's input - ideally someone familiar with a bit of code and also with professional writing for .I've read good introductory coding books and bad ones. This is bad.It hurts me to say it, and I'm sure the author is a good guy and the book might well hit smoother sailing further on, but p24-28 is a blizzard of woe. The different paths through the book of via Docker or elsewise need to be clearly mapped out and they just aren't.I might try to work out how to skip ahead and where to, but this is poor so far, and straight away p53, typo: the 'sit'.

This book is great for a number of reasons. Fist it doesn't bore me to death and I looked forward to completing the exercises. It explains things in a simple way and it really is just the basics of PHP. If you finish the book it will help you understand more complex PHP things later on. Everything in the book is easy to follow and understand. Only one thing though it does have little typo's and would need to be reviewed to get those fixed. The code as well is a bit simple but this is a beginners guide so if you are looking for more complex PHP examples best to find another book.

This book would be OK for a beginner who literally knows nothing about IT.If you're already familiar with HTMlL and SQL, then half the book is a waste of time, so considering it's a very short book anyway, the amount left to teach PHP is minuscule.

I read your book last night, and it was definitely a light bulb moment. I have been programming for more years than I care to remember, but mainly PC based development. We have decided that we need to move our application into the cloud to make it easier for our customers, but were struggling a bit with the concept. We now feel much more confident about the task ahead. Thank you

Bought the kindle version but decided it was better as a hardcopy so bought that as well.