Over the past three years PHP has evolved from being a niche language use to add dynamic functionality to small sites to a powerful tool making strong inroads into large-scale, business-critical Web systems. While there are many books on learning PHP and developing small applications with it, there is a serious lack of information on "scaling" PHP for large-scale, business-critical systems. Schlossnagle’s Advanced PHP Programming fills that void, demonstrating that PHP is ready for enterprise Web applications by showing the reader how to develop PHP-based applications for maximum performance, stability, and extensibility.

George Schlossnagle is a principal at OmniTI Computer Consulting, a Maryland-based tech company that specializes in high-volume Web and email systems. Before joining OmniTI, he led technical operations at several high-profile community Web sites, where he developed experience managing PHP in very large enterprise environments. He is a frequent contributor to the PHP community and his work can be found in the PHP core, as well as in the PEAR and PECL extension repositories.

Before entering the information technology field, George trained to be a mathematician and served a two-year stint as a teacher in the Peace Corps. His experience has taught him to value an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving that favors root-cause analysis of problems over simply addressing symptoms.

Over the past three years PHP has evolved from being a niche language used to add dynamic functionality to small sites to a powerful tool making strong inroads into large-scale, business-critical Web systems.

 

The rapid maturation of PHP has created a skeptical population of users from more traditional "enterprise" languages who question the readiness and ability of PHP to scale, as well as a large population of PHP developers without formal computer science backgrounds who have learned through the hands-on experimentation while developing small and midsize applications in PHP.

 

While there are many books on learning PHP and developing small applications with it, there is a serious lack of information on "scaling" PHP for large-scale, business-critical systems. Schlossnagle's Advanced PHP Programming fills that void, demonstrating that PHP is ready for enterprise Web applications by showing the reader how to develop PHP-based applications for maximum performance, stability, and extensibility.

Over the past three years PHP has evolved from being a niche language used to add dynamic functionality to small sites to a powerful tool making strong inroads into large-scale, business-critical Web systems.

The rapid maturation of PHP has created a skeptical population of users from more traditional "enterprise" languages who question the readiness and ability of PHP to scale, as well as a large population of PHP developers without formal computer science backgrounds who have learned through the hands-on experimentation while developing small and midsize applications in PHP.

While there are many books on learning PHP and developing small applications with it, there is a serious lack of information on "scaling" PHP for large-scale, business-critical systems. Schlossnagle's Advanced PHP Programming fills that void, demonstrating that PHP is ready for enterprise Web applications by showing the reader how to develop PHP-based applications for maximum performance, stability, and extensibility.

Over the past three years PHP has evolved from being a niche language used to add dynamic functionality to small sites to a powerful tool making strong inroads into large-scale, business-critical Web systems. The rapid maturation of PHP has created a skeptical population of users from more traditional ""enterprise"" languages who question the readiness and ability of PHP to scale, as well as a large population of PHP developers without formal computer science backgrounds who have learned through the hands-on experimentation while developing small and midsize applications in PHP. While there are many books on learning PHP and developing small applications with it, there is a serious lack of information on ""scaling"" PHP for large-scale, business-critical systems. Schlossnagle’s Advanced PHP Programming fills that void, demonstrating that PHP is ready for enterprise Web applications by showing the reader how to develop PHP-based applications for maximum performance, stability, and extensibility.

this book is for morons
If you are not a moron, you will put this book down after page 17.
Pages 16 and 17 (in the first chapter!!!) have code examples trying to argue the use of for/foreach loops over while loops. They are absolutely absurd. If the opening pages of a book have bogus examples and completely false arguments for saying "one should use foreach over for over while", then what hope does the book have for someone wanting to learn something "advanced"?

I am only submitting this review because of the absurdity of pages 16/17. I can not get past those pages. I can not believe this book has $49.99 on it. If I were a job recruiter, I would use page 16/17 as an idiot test--it has that much value, which might be worth $49.99 to recruiters fending off idiots.

"For the sake of example" can only be used if the example makes some sense. On page 16, the example presents a function "is_prime" that takes a parameter $number and returns true/false if the number is prime. The function uses a "while" loop. The author argues against the use of while loops (versus for loops), and essentially says: if you have a moron add some completely bogus, moronic, idiotic code to your almost nice, relatively efficient, functional function named "is_prime", then a "for" loop would help make that function into "is_odd" with an extraneous for loop that is completely inefficient. The examples (more than ten lines long!) equate to:
function is_prime($number){ //although this is really is_odd
return $number % 2;
}
which has no loops, is way more efficient, and has nothing to do with using for loops over while loops. In this book, we see a bunch of nonsense about (what ought to be for advanced programmers) a TRIVIAL example of control structures (while/for) that are equivalent in most programming languages.

Concise, objective and confidently written. Smart ideas for advanced developers
I lent my copy of Advanced PHP Programming to a friend last year and when I finally got it back it was dog-eared and edge-worn - a testament to how brilliant and useful the book is to any middle-weight or advanced developer.

The confident, objective writing style is immediately reassuring. Scholssnagle isn’t the kind of writer who stubbornly refuses to go into detail about how to use global variables, for example, on the basis that they’re evil and should be avoided at all costs. Instead, he explains how to incorporate them sensibly, acknowledges that they’re a ’big mistake’ and then suggests some alternative strategies. He doesn’t rant about or sneer at less-robust techniques, but calmly explains the risks and suggests alternatives.

There’s a lot of smart, fresh ideas in this book. The first chapter is on coding styles. There’s plenty of good, simple guidelines on how to lay out, structure, and document your code to make it easier to handle and some excellent advice (and examples) of coding styles to avoid. His approach is consistent: keep it simple and use the best tool for the job.

A short chapter on object orientation and design patterns gives a concise overview of PHP object orientation and covers a few of the most useful design patterns - adaptor, template, factory and singleton are explained carefully. It describes specific situations where you’ll find each pattern useful rather than just explaining the theory. A chapter on implementing templates explains the Model-View-Controller concept and goes on to show you how to use the Smarty templating engine. Several chapters on user authentication and session handling are very useful and contain some bright insights into fairly well-trodden subject area.

Some chapters have been worth their weight in gold. ’Managing the developing environment’ covers use of a versioning system and ’Designing a good API’ contains good, disciplined techniques worthy of incorporation into a development firm’s house-style guide.

Other chapters cover topics a lot of programmers often ignore altogether, including strategies for handling errors and exceptions, advice on how to use a versioning system, a comprehensive guide to unit testing with PHPUnit and a chapter on profiling and benchmarking applications (especially useful if, like me, you’ve been asked to document and refactor a large unwieldy application you didn’t write!)

Subject matter quickly becomes hardcore: A section on distributed applications and another on caching and performance tunings are not for the faint-hearted but surpised me with a wealth of good ideas and strategies for mid-sized projects. The last part of the book, which covers extensibility, probably won’t be of much use to a middle-weight web-developer. I’m curiously lacking in hunger to find out all about ZEND opcodes, and the lengthy chapter on writing PHP extensions has yet to come in handy. Nor can I imagine I’ll ever stay up late to read about ’Modifying and Introspecting the ZEND Engine’.

Each chapter ends with a helpful further reading section.

It’s certainly not light reading. Most of the chapters require plenty of time and concentration to digest and understand. It isn’t a tutorial book and, as the title suggests, it assumes you already have a very good understanding of the language and how to build applications with it. It’s improved my coding style considerably and made my applications far easier to work with. I recommend this book to any confident and proficient developer who wants to raise their game.

Do not buy this book
Do not buy this book. There are so many script examples in this book that do not work, let alone there are many weak and sloppy algorithms and code logic structures the author introduced. If you already bought this book, see his script example in Chapter 13 (A Sample Authentication Implementation), try to read line by line in his Cookie class example, can you find any flaw? Well, there are many them in this tiny/simple class, but i can just ignore and pretend to think that the author did not have enough time to test his own scripts before he put them in his book...but the algorithm/logic structures of the codes that bothers me! Weak algorithm, bad code control structure can lead to a buggy application that is not easy to debug!

Unacceptable number of mistakes
The book is ok generally in the areas it covers, however there are lots of errors in the example code and other parts of the text with some pieces taking many corrections to make them work. Things like getting :: and -> mixed up when calling functions, silly stuff but very annoying(how hard is it to test the code before it’s published?!?!). Seems like it was rushed and not had much effort put in compared to many other books I own. On this basis I would not recommend it.

Good INTERMEDIATE Book
Note:
Beginning PHP programmers will be lost. Start elsewhere.
Intermediate PHP programmers will learn a lot regarding technical details and good coding and design practices, but not enough to advance them to the level of ’Expert PHP Programmer’.
Expert PHP programmers should know most of the technical details found here, but they will likely learn a bit about good coding and design practices.

For beginners: *
For intermediates: ****
For experts: **1/2

I am an intermediate PHP programmer, so this book was perfect and extremely helpful for me. I can say that I was very impressed by this book for a few reasons. For one, it provides a nice overview of many useful topics (many of which are not exactly "advanced") such as object-oriented programming, error handling, templates, unit testing, caching, authentication/security, session-handling, remote procedure calls, performance analysis, and writing extensions. However, they are mostly just overviews. It gives the reader a good starting point regarding the various topics and introduces less experienced PHP programmers to the various topics which they may not have been concerned with formally. Unfortunately, even for an overview, a few of the sections were a bit too slim. Object-oriented programming was only touched on and some important topics related to object-oriented PHP were omitted. Also, remote procedure calls received so little attention that they might as well have been omitted. Other sections do a better job. The benchmarking and profiling sections were quite informative as were the sections on error handling (sort of) and unit testing. They aren’t comprehensive, but I know that I personally learned quite a bit even though I eventually had to seek out additional references. Regarding the various "advanced" PHP topics, the book is basically a jack of all trades, master of none. The book deserved to either be longer, split up into more than one volume, or it should have had a smaller scope. Still, it does a good job at providing an intermediate PHP programmer with plenty of introductory information on these "advanced" topics. It won’t make you an expert PHP programmer, but it will set you on the right path.

There are two main reasons that I liked this book: the clarity of explanations and examples and the strong emphasis on good programming and design practice. Nowhere in this book did I ever feel close to being lost and I can say that the author does an outstanding job at describing the concepts and he chooses good, fairly simple examples. Also, good practices are strongly emphasised through this book. Unfortunately, good practices and technical details are often treated separately in many books if good practices are covered at all. Here, the author never loses sight of this. Even when he gets into the dirty details, he constantly reminds the reader that some paths to the same goal are better than others and he clearly explains why. For this reason, I would even recommend this book to expert PHP programmers who probably already know most of the technical details, although the book is most useful for intermediate PHP programmers like myself.

In summary, this book is best for those who know the basics of PHP but are not yet experts. You will learn just enough technical details to prepare you for the next level even if this book won’t take you to that level. Also, this book will help almost anyone write cleaner, safer, better-designed programs, expect for beginners who would not be able to follow the examples and topics.

Final note: GREAT value.

Good INTERMEDIATE Book
Note:
Beginning PHP programmers will be lost. Start elsewhere.
Intermediate PHP programmers will learn a lot regarding technical details and good coding and design practices, but not enough to advance them to the level of ’Expert PHP Programmer’.
Expert PHP programmers should know most of the technical details found here, but they will likely learn a bit about good coding and design practices.

For beginners: *
For intermediates: ****
For experts: **1/2

I am an intermediate PHP programmer, so this book was perfect and extremely helpful for me. I can say that I was very impressed by this book for a few reasons. For one, it provides a nice overview of many useful topics (many of which are not exactly "advanced") such as object-oriented programming, error handling, templates, unit testing, caching, authentication/security, session-handling, remote procedure calls, performance analysis, and writing extensions. However, they are mostly just overviews. It gives the reader a good starting point regarding the various topics and introduces less experienced PHP programmers to the various topics which they may not have been concerned with formally. Unfortunately, even for an overview, a few of the sections were a bit too slim. Object-oriented programming was only touched on and some important topics related to object-oriented PHP were omitted. Also, remote procedure calls received so little attention that they might as well have been omitted. Other sections do a better job. The benchmarking and profiling sections were quite informative as were the sections on error handling (sort of) and unit testing. They aren’t comprehensive, but I know that I personally learned quite a bit even though I eventually had to seek out additional references. Regarding the various "advanced" PHP topics, the book is basically a jack of all trades, master of none. The book deserved to either be longer, split up into more than one volume, or it should have had a smaller scope. Still, it does a good job at providing an intermediate PHP programmer with plenty of introductory information on these "advanced" topics. It won’t make you an expert PHP programmer, but it will set you on the right path.

There are two main reasons that I liked this book: the clarity of explanations and examples and the strong emphasis on good programming and design practice. Nowhere in this book did I ever feel close to being lost and I can say that the author does an outstanding job at describing the concepts and he chooses good, fairly simple examples. Also, good practices are strongly emphasised through this book. Unfortunately, good practices and technical details are often treated separately in many books if good practices are covered at all. Here, the author never loses sight of this. Even when he gets into the dirty details, he constantly reminds the reader that some paths to the same goal are better than others and he clearly explains why. For this reason, I would even recommend this book to expert PHP programmers who probably already know most of the technical details, although the book is most useful for intermediate PHP programmers like myself.

In summary, this book is best for those who know the basics of PHP but are not yet experts. You will learn just enough technical details to prepare you for the next level even if this book won’t take you to that level. Also, this book will help almost anyone write cleaner, safer, better-designed programs, expect for beginners who would not be able to follow the examples and topics.

Final note: GREAT value.

Great enthusiasm badly implemented
Like so often with PHP, this book suffers from having boundless enthusiasm for the topics at hand but lacks the professional polish which is so increasingly rare. Within the the first chapter alone there are numerous syntactical errors within the code and the writing surrounding them. As the book progresses these are coupled with ambiguous explanations of potentially thorny problems and some glaring naming inconsistencies.

If you’re expecting a thoughtful and precise book, this isn’t it, no matter how hard it tries to be. The book highlights a number of excellent ideas but comes off as more of an extended opinion piece by the author with colloquial language and even extolling the virtues of his own software (APC).

Great for the occasional dip into but expect to do a lot of your own research into the topics presented.

Best of Breed for Advanced PHP Programming
As a teacher of PHP programming to final year undergraduates, I am always on the lookout for concise, well organized and accurate texts. This text meets and surpasses all of these criteria. The chapter on "Object Oriented Programming Through Design Patterns" is worth the cost of the book by itself. The publisher should encourage the author to put together an expanded second edition. Highly recommended.

A must read for intermediate level PHP Programmers or above
This is a hefty tome, weighing in at 650 pages chocked full of great information about advanced PHP programming. The book is divided into five sections each with several to many chapters. The sections are Implementation and Development Methodologies, Caching, Distributed Applications, Performance, and Extensibility. Where appropriate sample applications are developed to present a point, in other situations a higher level approach is taken.

Covered within various chapters are topics like Error Handling, Unit Testing, Computational Reuse, Session Handling, Benchmarks, Profiling, and detailed information on how the Zend Engine works. While I’ve used or learned about several of the topics covered within, I think I learned something (whether it was a new approach, completely new information, or a refinement to what I already believed) in every single section.

Ultimately, I think I will become a better PHP programmer for having read this book.

I will be recommending this book to all my friends, and basically to everyone of an intermediate skill level with PHP or above. My friends are going to need to buy their own copy though, as I will not let this one out of my sight.

A must read for intermediate level PHP Programmers or above
This is a hefty tome, weighing in at 650 pages chocked full of great information about advanced PHP programming. The book is divided into five sections each with several to many chapters. The sections are Implementation and Development Methodologies, Caching, Distributed Applications, Performance, and Extensibility. Where appropriate sample applications are developed to present a point, in other situations a higher level approach is taken.

Covered within various chapters are topics like Error Handling, Unit Testing, Computational Reuse, Session Handling, Benchmarks, Profiling, and detailed information on how the Zend Engine works. While I’ve used or learned about several of the topics covered within, I think I learned something (whether it was a new approach, completely new information, or a refinement to what I already believed) in every single section.

Ultimately, I think I will become a better PHP programmer for having read this book.

I will be recommending this book to all my friends, and basically to everyone of an intermediate skill level with PHP or above. My friends are going to need to buy their own copy though, as I will not let this one out of my sight.

Nice Survey Book / Not Great
I agree with other reviewers that this is a survey or concept book. Schlossnagle is a bright php programmer but a lousy teacher. Do not buy this book if you are hoping to learn ’Advanced PHP Programming’ from it. This book is too superficial in it’s coverage of the many subjects. Ie: Schlossnagle’s coverage of Object Oriented Programming is less than six pages (why bother?), and does not adequately cover the basics.

This book is good for introducing you to things you may not have thought of before. Ie: I liked the section on exceptions but found it too brief and assumed too much. I was therefore forced to read other materials, including the official php manual, before I had a real grasp of exceptions.

Larry Ullman does a much better job of explaining subjects. His PHP Advanced for the www (first edition) is an excellent book to actually learn from. Unfortunately it is a little dated and the second edition is still a couple months away.

Do yourself a favor, spend your money on another book if you are intending to actually learn ’Advanced PHP Programming’ from a book.

Nice Survey Book / Not Great
I agree with other reviewers that this is a survey or concept book. Schlossnagle is a bright php programmer but a lousy teacher. Do not buy this book if you are hoping to learn ’Advanced PHP Programming’ from it. This book is too superficial in it’s coverage of the many subjects. Ie: Schlossnagle’s coverage of Object Oriented Programming is less than six pages (why bother?), and does not adequately cover the basics.

This book is good for introducing you to things you may not have thought of before. Ie: I liked the section on exceptions but found it too brief and assumed too much. I was therefore forced to read other materials, including the official php manual, before I had a real grasp of exceptions.

Larry Ullman does a much better job of explaining subjects. His PHP Advanced for the www (first edition) is an excellent book to actually learn from. Unfortunately it is a little dated and the second edition is still a couple months away.

Do yourself a favor, spend your money on another book if you are intending to actually learn ’Advanced PHP Programming’ from a book.

A PHP programmers must have!!
If you are a programmer and want to learn about good practice and design ideas, and are not interested in re-reading about loop constructs or basic beginner-type chapters, then this book is for you.

The author is evidently an ’expert’ from the way he writes but it is also a very well written book providing informative and advanced ideas on how to get the best out of PHP5.

If you know your way around PHP4/5 and want to move onto the next stage, then buy it....you will not regret it!

The Elevator from the Intermediate Level to the Professional Level
Read on if you are:



- Used to PHP programming, but not a very sophisticated programmer.

- Looking out to do more programming on a higher level.

- Ready to read through book texts three times and to read further material that is not included in the book you buy.



Schlossnagle’s book is not written along one red line, it covers various topics and allows jumping around quite freely. However, the topics that it covers are highly efficient in helping you advance with your programming skills. They might not quite be what you’d expect from a PHP book, because actually Schlossnagle covers anything that is needed to work with PHP on a professional level.

Consider this list of topics:



- Write clean code

- OO-Design Patterns

- Project documentation

- Performance tunings



This is all not really PHP-only stuff, but it is a great source of inspiration and furthers the understanding of programming in general very much. The latter I find is necessary for everybody who’s up to something bigger in PHP.



The PHP examples in the book are - I have to admit - maybe sometimes rather scarce. One would like to see more applications of abstract problems, more examples. But is that what a book is for, to give examples?

I don’t think so. For me a book is mainly a source of great ideas from great programmers, anything else is available on the web.



After having bought "Advanced PHP Programming" I purchased other books, the topics of which I would not have considered without reading Schlossnagle’s work. I’m just about to write a diploma work and the book is a great reference for anything concerning PHP and development projects.

The Elevator from the Intermediate Level to the Professional Level
Read on if you are:

- Used to PHP programming, but not a very sophisticated programmer.
- Looking out to do more programming on a higher level.
- Ready to read through book texts three times and to read further material that is not included in the book you buy.

Schlossnagle’s book is not written along one red line, it covers various topics and allows jumping around quite freely. However, the topics that it covers are highly efficient in helping you advance with your programming skills. They might not quite be what you’d expect from a PHP book, because actually Schlossnagle covers anything that is needed to work with PHP on a professional level.
Consider this list of topics:

- Write clean code
- OO-Design Patterns
- Project documentation
- Performance tunings

This is all not really PHP-only stuff, but it is a great source of inspiration and furthers the understanding of programming in general very much. The latter I find is necessary for everybody who’s up to something bigger in PHP.

The PHP examples in the book are - I have to admit - maybe sometimes rather scarce. One would like to see more applications of abstract problems, more examples. But is that what a book is for, to give examples?
I don’t think so. For me a book is mainly a source of great ideas from great programmers, anything else is available on the web.

After having bought "Advanced PHP Programming" I purchased other books, the topics of which I would not have considered without reading Schlossnagle’s work. I’m just about to write a diploma work and the book is a great reference for anything concerning PHP and development projects.

The Elevator from the Intermediate Level to the Professional Level
Read on if you are:

- Used to PHP programming, but not a very sophisticated programmer.
- Looking out to do more programming on a higher level.
- Ready to read through book texts three times and to read further material that is not included in the book you buy.

Schlossnagle’s book is not written along one red line, it covers various topics and allows jumping around quite freely. However, the topics that it covers are highly efficient in helping you advance with your programming skills. They might not quite be what you’d expect from a PHP book, because actually Schlossnagle covers anything that is needed to work with PHP on a professional level.
Consider this list of topics:

- Write clean code
- OO-Design Patterns
- Project documentation
- Performance tunings

This is all not really PHP-only stuff, but it is a great source of inspiration and furthers the understanding of programming in general very much. The latter I find is necessary for everybody who’s up to something bigger in PHP.

The PHP examples in the book are - I have to admit - maybe sometimes rather scarce. One would like to see more applications of abstract problems, more examples. But is that what a book is for, to give examples?
I don’t think so. For me a book is mainly a source of great ideas from great programmers, anything else is available on the web.

After having bought "Advanced PHP Programming" I purchased other books, the topics of which I would not have considered without reading Schlossnagle’s work. I’m just about to write a diploma work and the book is a great reference for anything concerning PHP and development projects.

If you want to make better code this is your book
This book is more than your trivial "PHP for Dummies". This book can help you become not only a better programmer; it can help make you a professional programmer. So far, I haven’t found any other book that was any help for me.

Yes, some of the samples have errors and some of the topics you might have wanted a little more elaborate. But if you consider yourself professional or even aspire to it: Get over it. Fix the bugs and study up on the subjects.

I successfully moved our PHP development from design anarchy to a fully version controlled, MVC-pattern guided and template based PHP development. I appreciate all the help I got from Schlossnagle. Would someone please cut through all the ".NET for dummies" books out there and give me some of this?

If you want to make better code this is your book
This book is more than your trivial "PHP for Dummies". This book can help you become not only a better programmer; it can help make you a professional programmer. So far, I haven’t found any other book that was any help for me.

Yes, some of the samples have errors and some of the topics you might have wanted a little more elaborate. But if you consider yourself professional or even aspire to it: Get over it. Fix the bugs and study up on the subjects.

I successfully moved our PHP development from design anarchy to a fully version controlled, MVC-pattern guided and template based PHP development. I appreciate all the help I got from Schlossnagle. Would someone please cut through all the ".NET for dummies" books out there and give me some of this?

Accurate, Concise, Important
This book covers a whole number of hard core advanced PHP topics. I was at a pretty high PHP standard before I read this book, and when I did read it, it polished off any gaps in my knowledge, and helped me to become better. To give you an idea of how in depth this book is, on commandline PHP scripts, it covers chroot jailing your scripts, forking and controlling child processes from your script and special file locking to ensure only one instance of a script runs at any one time. It’s an enormously in depth book that should a) be read well and b) be kept close by as a reference.

Slow to ship
Product was in good condition when recieved, but it took the seller a very long time to ship.

Good, But Not Great
Think of this book as a survey of advanced PHP topics. It won’t make you an expert at any of the topics that it covers, but it will point you in the right direction and open you up to new concepts that you might not have heard before.

It does, however, have problems. Consider the following statement from the introduction on page one: "Examples are not very useful without context, so all the code in this book is real code that accomplishes real tasks. You will not find examples in this book with class names such as Foo and Bar ...."

Now consider the example on page 256:
class Foo {
public function id() {
return "I am a Foo";
}
}

Or on page 53:
class C implements A, B {
public function abba()
{
// abba;
}
public function bar()
{
// bar
}
}

I understand the author was going over trivial examples, but if you’re going to say you’re going to do something, please do it. Not a bad book, but there are better choices. Wait for your library to get this one.

Good, But Not Great
Think of this book as a survey of advanced PHP topics. It won’t make you an expert at any of the topics that it covers, but it will point you in the right direction and open you up to new concepts that you might not have heard before.

It does, however, have problems. Consider the following statement from the introduction on page one: "Examples are not very useful without context, so all the code in this book is real code that accomplishes real tasks. You will not find examples in this book with class names such as Foo and Bar ...."

Now consider the example on page 256:
class Foo {
public function id() {
return "I am a Foo";
}
}

Or on page 53:
class C implements A, B {
public function abba()
{
// abba;
}
public function bar()
{
// bar
}
}

I understand the author was going over trivial examples, but if you’re going to say you’re going to do something, please do it. Not a bad book, but there are better choices. Wait for your library to get this one.

Just read the book
This is the 3rd PHP book I’ve read. In my opinion, a professional PHP programmer can find a lot of useful things in this book about serious programming in PHP. The disadvantages of the book, however, are:

1. many errors in the code
2. also the code is not organized very well (it is not plug ’n’ play)
3. the sort of difficult language (for non-English speaking readers)

Just read the book
This is the 3rd PHP book I’ve read. In my opinion, a professional PHP programmer can find a lot of useful things in this book about serious programming in PHP. The disadvantages of the book, however, are:

1. many errors in the code
2. also the code is not organized very well (it is not plug ’n’ play)
3. the sort of difficult language (for non-English speaking readers)

Absolutely excellent
Excellent book, not only for PHP, but also for any programming language, especially web-developpement languages.

Vague Concept Book - Nothing Immediately Useful
I’m very disappointed with this book. It touches on some concepts that could be useful but there is absolutely nothing in this book a PHP programmer can put to use right away. I’ve built several web sites using PHP/MySQL and there is not one single thing in this book useful to me.

The book is mainly a survey of concepts, NOT an advanced programming guide. Nothing in this book is fleshed out completely enough to actually begin using it in programming your website.

If you want to actually use any of the ideas in the book, you will have to find a better source of information and documentation for the particular idea or technology. For example, the book has a decent introduction to the Smarty template system but not enough info to actually start using it effectively. There are no performance or feature comparisons between Smarty and other template systems so I’m not even sure how you’re supposed to decide if Smarty is right for you (the author merely mentions that Smarty is popular, not why you should or should not use Smarty). Another example: the book talks about three different load generators and gives examples of their use (about 1.5 pages each) but definitely not enough details to begin using any of them.

The only thing of value I got from this book is a conceptual understanding of reverse proxies. Of course, if you actually want to implement a reverse proxy yourself, you’re going to need a lot more information than you’ll find in this book.

I gave this book two stars instead of one because it is a halfway decent survey. The title, however, is totally inappropriate. It has nothing to do with advanced PHP programming. Instead, the title should be, "Shallow Survey of Concepts and Tools Related to PHP and Web Development".