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Reviews of this product:
No fluff guide to new features in PHP 5
I was fortunate to start working with PHP after it moved to version 5. Although they are separate books, each with a very different style, I came to regard "Upgrading to PHP 5" as Part 2 of O'Reilly's two main PHP 5 instructional volumes (Part 1 being "Learning PHP 5" by David Sklar). "Upgrading to PHP 5" is fast-paced, wastes no space on elaborate or unnecessary narrative and provides short but helpful examples for each significant issue. It's a relatively small book and is less expansive than than the more detailed books in O'Reilly's "Programming" series, but it contains more detailed explanation and examples than is typically the case with the terse Nutshell books. (IMHO anyway). In particular I found the chapters on MySQLi (especially the sections on prepared statements, SQLite and error handling very useful. It's definitely for those serious about learning the "new" features in version 5 of the language. (scare-quotes around "new" because it's now June, 2007)
While "Upgrading to PHP 5" provides a good overview of the features unique to PHP 5, its text and examples will be too pithy for most starting out with object-oriented programming. For getting to grips with OOP using PHP 5, I wholeheartedly recommend "PHP 5 Objects, Patterns and Practice", a superb work by Matt Zandstra (Apress). Not only is it very well-written and contains a great discussion of general OOP principles, but there's also plenty of consideration of OOP application design specifically in relation to PHP's 'per-request' nature (i.e. PHP's eschewal of a persistent memory scope in which to 'cache' your OOP class definitions and object instances). That is, Zandstra's OOP is crafted mindful of the fact that (where 3rd party memory caching is not used) your OOP application design will need to run with each request and thus will need to avoid the kind of OO complexity you typically encounter in J2EE or even OO ColdFusion application designs.
To sum up, if you're new to PHP I recommend all three books. If you're already a black belt in PHP 4, then I suspect that the Trachtenberg and Zandstra books will be all you need to move to both PHP 5 and OOP. (Although I should probably warn that the Zandstra book may be a bit advanced for absolute OOP noobs...). Finally, if you can afford it, get the excellent second edition of the "PHP Cookbook" too! It'll probably save you many hours of rooting around on well-meaning but aesthetically challenging PHP-related bulletin boards.
A very comprehensive guide for the practiced
Having used PHP4 to develop a couple of web sites, I decided that I would keep myself abreast of what is coming with the advent of PHP5. I had already purchased 'Learning PHP5' from the same publishers, in order to remind myself of the basics and also to see if the fundamentals were any different! This book augments this beautifully, going into the next level of detail from the aforementioned book. It covers a lot of the new PHP5 functionality, and illustrates PHP4 examples and their PHP5 counterparts very well. If you're just starting out, I'd definitely go for either 'Learning PHP5' or the 'PHP 5 and MySQL Bible'. If you're already fairly PHP savvy, then this book will prove highly useful! A great purchase.
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