Useful book on an Increasingly Important Topic
PHP isn’t a magical solution to dynamic HTML, but it comes as close as anything is likely to. I’ve met Gogala at a few OUG meetings and he knows his stuff. If you aren’t familiar with the topic read the book twice - first time leafing through to get an overview of the capabilities then a second drilling down. Time well spent. Throwing together a quick EIS dashboard using PHP is a great way to please the guys with the checkbooks. Like lighting a match in front of jungle natives, they’ll bow down, cry "Great Juju!" and brag about it to other holders of unearned stock options at the golf club.

An excellent guide to the powerful combination of PHP and Oracle
Mladen did an excellent job bringing Oracle and PHP together in his book, Easy Oracle PHP. As a Sr. Oracle DBA and a long time PHP developer, I was honored to be a part of its release as a technical editor.

Easy Oracle PHP contains many outstanding examples of the possible uses of these two powerful technologies. In addition, the book is easy to read and understand, despite both PHP and Oracle being potentially complex topics. The many examples and scripts in this book were well written by Mr. Gogala, and I personally tested each one. These step-by-step scripts make it easy for anyone, even beginners, to become well accommodated with the many uses of PHP; the scripts even give the developer the basis for a very handy Oracle database monitoring tool!

A good knowledge of PHP has become something of an competitive edge in the development world. This book provides the methods by which anyone can learn to use it with the most powerful database software on the public market.

Great way to Set up database monitoring web pages
For those us who need to provide CIO’s with an alternative to buying expensive Event Management Monitoring tools, Mladen’s book provides the perfect blueprint to merging SQL scripts into web pages. They key here is easy dyamic web pages.

Most of the the time, management wants to see results in easy to read Web formatting that easily displays the current state of systems: hence, expensive monitoring tools. Using PHP, one can write an effective but cheap portable monitoring solution by existing monitoring SQL scripts into PHP. As such, this book has provided me an important opportunity to show cost conscience management a real working alternative to laying out $250k for monitoring tools.

Save your money
I am afraid that Donald Burleson’s kudos for this book, for which he is the series editor, means that he did not read it. This book is riddled with typographical errors, in both the code and the text. The code examples that you download do not always match the corresponding example from the book, and in some cases, neither work. Also, be aware that only the `include’ files are available for download. The examples from each chapter, which is the majority of code in the book, are not available. Save your money.

A great way to get started with Oracle on the web
As the series editor for this book I was involved in Gogala’s book, from initial inception to finished product, and I’m impressed. Oracle offers a wealth of different tools to create dynamic web pages (Apex (HTML-DB), Jdeveloper, Ruby on Rail on Oracle, etc.) and PHP is an excellent choice because it is powerful, mature and has well-tested Oracle interfaces.

It’s very difficult to take a complex topic such as Oracle with PHP and condense it into an understandable and concise framework, but Gogala has met this challenge.

PHP is, by its very nature, a flexible and robust language, and I was happy to see that Gogala resisted the temptation to go into all of the advanced PHP features.

This is not an advanced PHP Oracle book. Rather, it is a get-started guide with lots of simple, easy to understand examples, and working Oracle PHP code snippets in the code download to allow beginners to get started fast. Mladen spent hundreds of hours refining his text and working with Steve Karam, his technical editor, and I hope that you will agree that this is a great way to get started with Oracle databases on the web.