PHP: The Good Parts: Delivering the Best of PHP

By Peter MacIntyre

Get past all the hype about PHP and dig into the real power of this language. This book explores the most useful features of PHP and how they can speed up the web development process, and explains why the most commonly used PHP elements are often misused or misapplied. You'll learn which parts add strength to object-oriented programming, and how to use certain features to integrate your application with databases.

Written by a longtime member of the PHP community, PHP: The Good Parts is ideal for new PHP programmers, as well as web developers switching from other languages.

• Become familiar with PHP's basic syntax, variables, and datatypes
• Learn how to integrate the language with web pages
• Understand how to use strings, arrays, and PHP's built-in functions
• Discover the advantages of using PHP as an object-oriented language
• Explore how PHP interacts with databases, such as SQLite and MySQL
• Learn input- and output-handling best practices to prevent security breaches

• Language: English
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 7, 2010
• ISBN: 9781449391393

Peter MacIntyre

Peter MacIntyre has over 28 years of experience in the information technology industry, primarily in the area of PHP and Web Technologies. He has contributed writing material for many IT industry publications: Author of PHP: The Good Parts (O’Reilly); co-author: Pro PHP Programming (APress), Programming PHP (3rd Edition - O’Reilly), Using Visual Objects, Using PowerBuilder 5, ASP.NET Bible, Web Warrior Survey on Web Development Languages, and Zend Studio for Eclipse Developer's Guide. Peter is a co-founder and past co-chair and past board member for the Northeast PHP Developer's Conference held in Boston, MA and Charlottetown, PE Canada for the last 6 years (northeastphp.org). As well, Peter has spoken several times at North American and International computer conferences including PHPCE 2017 in Warsaw, Poland; PHP[World] 2016 in Washington, DC; ZendCon 2016 in Las Vegas, NortheastPHP 2017 & 2016 (Charlottetown, PE, Canada), Prairie Dev Con 2016 in Winnipeg, MB, Canada, CA-World in New Orleans, USA; CA-TechniCon in Cologne, Germany; and CA-Expo in Melbourne, Australia. He is a Zend Certified Engineer in PHP 5.3 and PHP 4.0.

Reviews for PHP

[nathanm_3 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I was hoping this book would do for PHP what Douglas Crockford's book did for JavaScript. However, I was disappointed. This is a decent introduction to PHP for programmers who don't know the language, but it's very shallow. The examples are rather short, and the author directs you to the documentation for most of the details. He introduces the appendix titled "The Bad Parts," by purporting "that PHP does not have any really bad parts"! He chalks up some "potentially tricky areas" to programmers' errors... Exactly the kinds of "bad parts" that language designers should try to mitigate.