XML and PHP

Author: Vikram Vaswani List Price: $39.99 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0735712271 Publisher: SAMS (15 July, 2002) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 160,583 Average Customer Rating: 3.58 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

Even further, the examples are so basic and the chapters don't explain anything beyond those examples either. I'm surprised people found this book useful since everything is obvious that those university computer science monkeys who are still learning Windows can figure this book out.

But where are the best practices? Where are the examples used within an object oriented architecture? Do you think we are idiot programmers who only know how to code procedural programs that all reside within a single server page. Get real.

On the other hand, I was very impressed with the Wrox book. Although some of the intro chapters were fairly useless (since they covered intro to PHP concepts and so forth), the chapters talking about SAX, DOM, XSLT and XML-RPC are much better and totally outshine this book's counterparts. They even discuss Object oriented programs in all most cases and will provide you both versions a lot of the time! Even further, the Wrox book shows you various examples about solving common problems. I actually think the authors showed me all the potential problems you can have for that matter; they were pretty detailed, especially in the SAX and XSLT chapters.

After reading some of the reviews about XML and PHP, such as "This book doesn't suck" or Manual Lemos's review (a guy who contributes a lot of PHP code to the community) stating "this book was the best on PHP and XML available", it's obvious that they have ties to the author and want to see him succeed. Don't let them pull you in - this book isn't even worth the sympathy.

Xi Chi's review was right on the bull's eye. I should have listened to it and so should you. Avoid this book like the plague and get Wrox's PHP4 XML book instead.

So given all these statements, I thought I'd present a true review - one from an actual reader rather than from someone else. I think it's pretty safe to assume that this book is good for some people and bad for others. The problem is that the reviews already here have so much fluff that they didn't even begin to describe themselves, thus they could be ambitious or lazy, smart or dim, and hobbyist or entrepreneurs. There is simply no way of telling.

Personally, I think many of these concepts can be learned in PHP in about 2-3 days of trying the APIs out if you already know a great deal of XML. So if I'm going to buy a book on PHP and XML, I expect that it will provided added value information as well as design decisions, business concerns and best practices. Examples are not what I care about as much as the rich and deep information because there are many examples already on the web - no point acquiring the book just for those alone. That makes me question the reviewers who say the examples are clear and concise - the examples on the web already do that. Books are supposed to provide added value to these APIs and examples to make the topic complete and valuable to the reader. The book should also scale well to both beginning audiences (this book does very well) to expert audiences that want to drill through the basic information like APIs and examples and learn more advanced techniques, best practices, etc. This book doesn't deliver on these areas very well unfortunately.

So, for a person like me: This book receives 2 stars. I didn't learn all that much from it and I was disappointed to say the least. He's a good writer, funny at times, and knows what he is doing, but he also catered to a specific audience and it shows. Is that the goal? Probably. But I think the expert people shouldn't have expected too much (as I did) - that's the truth.

Although I personally give this book 2 stars, I believe that many beginner PHP programmers who have a little idea to what XML is will benefit from it. If you've already read some XML material on the net and even read a book or two, this book won't exactly help you out too much. However, this segment is rather small I would believe. I'm still looking for a book that I can give to my employees for reference as well as added value information. When I find it, I'll put a review there as well so you can compare.

So there you have it - an honest review. I hope it helps people out in their purchasing decisions.

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