Tips and Tools for Creating Dynamic Web Sites
ISBN: 0596101392
Pages: 445
Publisher: O’Reilly
Topic: PHP
Rating: 
– (4 out of 5)
PHP Hacks provides you with a 100 useful pieces of code that can be used in your own web projects. The 100 pieces of code are split up into sections, which include Web design, DHTML, Graphics, Application Design, Patterns, Testing and Fun Stuff.
PHP Hacks is a very useful book which could provide you with just the piece of code you are looking for in order to complete a task using PHP. Some of the code may require other languages such as interactions with javascript or extra libraries such as from PEAR, which can be downloaded from the internet for free.
One of the useful tips I found early on was how to install PEAR on your web host even if you do not have admin access to your web server. This is a great tip as the PEAR libraries include some great functionality that can speed up your PHP code creation.
PHP Hacks includes such tips as how to build a dynamic breadcrumb trail, how to create HTML boxes using PHP and CSS. PHP Hacks also shows you how to create drag and drop PHP lists that work in a browser, as well as how to create dynamic graphs.
As there are one hundred hacks I cannot mention them all here, but other hacks that stand out include creating an interactive calendar, creating Excel documents using PHP, convert CSV to PHP, screen scrape web pages using PHP, load your database from Excel, create your own message queue, read XML using regular expressions and how to spider your own web site.
Obviously a number of these hacks may be available on the internet, but you would have to hunt them down and then they may not work, but it’s really good to have all of these hacks in one book. If you are a PHP programmer then I guarantee you will use several of these hacks in your own applications, as these PHP Hacks are so good.
There are a lot of other PHP books on the market you could buy but they all seem to just be for beginners and take you through the basics of PHP and show you a few example applications built using PHP, but PHP Hacks includes code that can provide you with functionality that you really want to have on your web site.