learning PHP - book idea?

[Bob Hall]

On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 08:43:18PM +0100, Jez Hancock wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 03:28:18PM -0400, Bob Hall wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 16, 2003 at 10:57:02AM +0100, Jez Hancock wrote:
> > > If you already have the basics down, a good intermediate level book is:
> > > 
> > > PHP Developer's Cookbook, Sterling Hughes, SAMS
> > 
> > I own a copy of that book, and it's terrible. My recommendation is 
> > to avoid it. I tried to use it a few months ago when I was doing 
> > extensive work on a site, and everything I tried to use from the book 
> > was buggy. In some cases, the bugs were obvious and easily fixed, but 
> > in other cases, they weren't obvious and took time and effort to fix. 
> > On the other hand, I've had no problems with OReily's PHP cookbook.
> In support of the author, he does answer emails very rapidly.  In my
> experience the majority of the recipes worked perfectly.  There was one
> specific PEAR class example (Net CURL iirc) which he'd added in the book
> but at the time hadn't actually released into the PEAR CVS repo.  Oops ;/

I remember having to debug the database abstraction code, although I 
no longer remember what the problem was. I tried to use other bits of 
code that turned out to have bugs, none of them involving CURL. I 
eventually stopped trying to use the SAMS book, and bought the ORielly 
book instead. I'm sure Mr. Hughes is a good programmer, but I'm guessing 
that he updated PHP3 code for PHP4 without testing it. For those of us 
who don't programm PHP full time, this introduces subtle errors that are 
sometimes hard to spot.

Bob Hall