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Books: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly


dsavi

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I believe strongly in books as a main source of training because unlike tutorials on the internet, they are required to have a certain standard of quality in order to get published. Some books are better, some are worse, and some are incredible. I'd like this to become some sort of reference on what books to get or not. So post your experiences with books on programming or web design, I suppose.

 

Some books I've read:

 

Learning PHP 5 (David Sklar/June 2004/O'Reilly Media)

 

tl;dr: Pretty good- When it was relevant.

 

This is the book I learned the basics of PHP from; It also teaches some basic SQL (It assumes prior knowledge of very basic HTML/CSS). It covers the basics: basic syntax, form handling, databases, XML, string manipulation and a few extra things here and there. The thing is, PHP has changed quite a bit since this book was released in 2004, and if there isn't an updated version I would recommend a generic introductory PHP 6 book. It is easy to understand though. Good, but not exceptionally good.

 

PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice 2nd Edition (Matt Zandstra/December 2007/Apress)

 

tl;dr: A third edition updated to reflect the changes in PHP 6 would be the be all and end all guide to object-oriented programming in PHP. Already fits that role for PHP 5, in my opinion.

 

This is an extremely good book. It's not the kind that you read once and you're done with, there's no way you can read this book in less than two months it's so packed with information. It starts off with the basics of object oriented design (What are objects? How do you make them in PHP?) and how you actually make them, then goes on into inheritance. The rest of the book (About 300 pages) is dedicated to design patterns and the practical stuff that prevents you from banging your head on the wall. It explains all kinds of patterns in detail and shows practical usage and code examples for each one. You can read this book even if you don't have a clue what objects are (I'm living proof), I would recommend this book to anyone who is thinking of seriously doing PHP. It doesn't cover some of the very newest syntactical features of PHP like anonymous functions and namespaces (At least completely), but that is understandable as the book was written in 2006-2007 and those features were released in 2009.

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I really liked Head First PHP and MySQL: http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-MySQL-Lynn-Beighley/dp/0596006306/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267463404&sr=8-2

 

I've read it all, haven't worked through the code examples much though, so I don't consider myself to have completed it.

 

It's a very simple book, not like your typical textbook, lots of examples, it goes slowly, but I found that worked pretty well.

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"It's not a rest for me, it's a rest for the weights." - Dom Mazzetti

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I avoid those "Head First" things because they look so stupid. You can actually tell a lot about the contents of a technical book by its cover, I've found, as the publishing companies that don't bother to hire a graphic designer are usually the ones that don't pay much attention to the quality of the book. Especially the ones that try stupid things with the cover, like some silly version of a serif font with a fisheye closeup of a guy smiling.

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I avoid those "Head First" things because they look so stupid. You can actually tell a lot about the contents of a technical book by its cover, I've found, as the publishing companies that don't bother to hire a graphic designer are usually the ones that don't pay much attention to the quality of the book. Especially the ones that try stupid things with the cover, like some silly version of a serif font with a fisheye closeup of a guy smiling.

 

You know what, it isn't a great resource book - but that's not what it's supposed to be. If all the constant paragraphs of text and vague examples tend to confuse you, these books use a much more varied way of presenting the information. Now, I found for some things it basically resulted in a huge oversimplification, but for some harder concepts I picked them up really fast thanks to the explanations they gave.

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"It's not a rest for me, it's a rest for the weights." - Dom Mazzetti

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I'm a pretty big fan of most O'Reilly books out there, mostly concerning myself with the pocketbooks (their C++ pocketbook is terse enough to use as a reference), but the definitive book I've used to help with C++ is "Starting Out With C++, Early Objects, Sixth Edition" by Tony Gaddis et al.

 

The Python books I've been looking into are "Beginning Python, Second Edition" by Magnus Lie Hetland (paperback), and "Dive Into Python 3" by Mark Pilgrim (available as a free e-book).

 

There are also pretty good "phrasebooks" out there; the last one I bought was "Linux Phrasebook" by Scott Grannerman.

Linux User/Enthusiast Full-Stack Software Engineer | Stack Overflow Member | GIMP User
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...Alright, the Elf City update lured me back to RS over a year ago.

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