Advanced PHP Programming

I just bought this book two days ago, here are my initial, non-judgemental thoughts….

I spent some time glancing through the book and was surprised by how un-Advanced it was. Then again, this shouldn’t surprise me, because PHP really has a rather low barrier to entry. That means there are quite a few people using PHP who have no formal training in CS or SE.

So, its not until page 475 that the book gets to the stuff I want to learn (PHP internals and writing PHP modules). Everything before that seems to be stuff I’m familar with from the Internet (that doesn’t mean it isn’t handy to have it all in book form).

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 13th, 2005 at 2:54 pm.

2 Responses to “Advanced PHP Programming”

  1. Greg Beaver Says:
    February 15th, 2005 at 2:06 pm

    Funny, I just bought that book yesterday for the same reasons. I figured that those last 200 pages or so was well worth the price. It’s extremely clear writing (so far) and I’m understanding these mysterious symbols I’ve seen all over the source code while doing things like trying to find bugs in the tokenizer extension.

    I haven’t begun to look at the other stuff in the book, I’m sure it would be useful since Schlossnagle is such a good programmer. Who knows :)

  2. ryan king Says:
    February 15th, 2005 at 5:14 pm

    I certainly agree that the last 200 pages will likely be worth the price.

    Really, the point I was trying to get across is how un-advanced advanced php is compared to other language communities. Its not because there aren’t some really advanced people and projects at the top end, but because there is such a large number of PHP users who have no formal CS education. Of course I’m saying this from the perspective of someone with a BS in CS and working on a MS.

    And, as a sidenote, after looking at it more, there really are some intersting sections on clustering, which is a big part of getting a large website to perform well.