Oracle Database 10g Express Edition PHP Web Programming Book Review

Create Dynamic, Data Driven Web Applications

“Oracle Database 10g Express Edition PHP Web Programming” begins by instructing you how to install of the programs you require in order to get the most out of the “Oracle Database 10g XE PHP Web Programming” book.

The first half of “Oracle Database 10g XE PHP Web Programming” teaches you the basics of PHP programming, without the mention of an Oracle database in site. These chapters are for people who are new to PHP or for people who want to further their knowledge of PHP. Each chapter is broken into a certain area of PHP programming, such as arrays, control structures (if then else..), functions, objects, error handling, cookies and file manipulation.

The actual section on Oracle is quite small, and basically instructs you how to programmatically connect to the Oracle database using PHP and OCI. “Oracle Database 10g XE PHP Web Programming” then gives you all the examples you need of how to add your various Oracle SQL queries such as select, inserts, update, delete etc to the PHP script and then how to output the results using HTML all in one PHP page.

The following chapters describe handling Oracle PL/SQL transactions when using PHP with the Oracle database, and how to handle Large Object Transactions, such as displaying and saving BLOBs, CLOBs etc.

“Oracle Database 10g XE PHP Web Programming” contains a large number of appendices, 10 in total. They cover such topics such as an HTML Tag Index, PHP Environment Constants, SQL Primer and PL/SQL Primer, and Database Setup Scripts.

“Oracle Database 10g Express Edition PHP Web Programming” includes a CD, which contains all code examples from the book as well as Oracle Database Express Edition for Linux and Windows, Apache v2 and PHP.

I think it would have been better to have included a little more about the Oracle database and what you can actually do with it when interacting with the database using PHP, maybe this has been left out for inclusion in an advanced book. There was also some strange coding techniques in some examples which I don’t think you would use in the real world, such as embedding long sections of HTML tags in PHP print tags. It would be better to design the HTML part in a web editor such as Dreamweaver so you can see what you are designing then write in your PHP and Oracle code into the page.

This is a good book if you are just starting out and want to learn PHP or update your PHP skills and you need to know how to interact with an Oracle database using PHP.

The skills covered in the book are not just specific to Oracle Express Edition, connecting to and using PHP with Oracle can be used on most versions of the Oracle database, but it would be nice to see more mentions of the Express Edition database and perhaps not so many appendices are necessary, but you may utilise these a lot for reference in the future.