Secure PHP Development: Building 50 Practical Applications

Author: Mohammed J. Kabir List Price: $50.00 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0764549669 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (15 March, 2003) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 455,067 Average Customer Rating: 2.29 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

Firstly, the book is littered with errors, typos, and poor grammar. It appears as though it was rushed into publication without any real editorial and technical review. Now this is nothing new in the world of IT books, but it is always disappointing. And there is not even an errata list on the wiley site or the evoknow site.

Secondly, the source code does not run out of the box. This is normally ok if you are given clear instructions as to setting up and configuring, but alas there is no such information. Of course there have been source code updates (which are completely different file structure to the original on the cd, rendering the cd essentially useless) which indicates again that the publication was rushed without proper scrutiny and testing. Loading the code tree under "demo" and browsing to your web server accordingly immediately comes up with errors when loading the index.php home page. Not a good sign, I mean come on, is that the way to start us off? And how exactly has the source code itself changed? How can one know whether what is being read will match the supplied source code???

Thirdly, you have made it clear your source code has not been tested on a Windows environment. I find this a major oversight as a large proportion of PHP development is done on Windows, even if it ends up running on *nix servers. There are also no setup instructions for Windows, only Linux. This is a seriously flawed presumption in my mind.

I am hoping things get better with this book once I am able to set up and run the applications properly, and see the theory in the book (which is useful in the majority of cases) in practice. However, after paying ... here in Australia, I am left with a sour taste, and will think twice before buying a Wiley or Kabir publication again.

Another thing that gets my goat is the boldfaced use of Internet Explorer, MS Access, MS Excel for presenting the screen dumps and what looks like MS Visio for the system diagrams. It just seems hypocritcal that this would occur, for at the same time not providing install instructions and unsupported and untested code for the Windows platform. I dunno about anyone else, but it just doesn't sit well with me. Part IV is totally useless to anyone not using Linux, and Red Hat 8 at that. Not only has this book marginalised Windows users, but reduced its usefulness to one flavour of Linux.

This could have been a good book. It aims high, but falls terribly short. The framework might come of some use, but a lot of hacking about just to get something out of this disaster may prove less than worthy of my time and effort. Reading the source code from the book itself is just too painful. Poorly formatted, lots of repetition, and basically every line of the complete application code is printed. Whatever happened to highlighting important code as necessary to avoid redundancy? The problem with this kinda thing is that its difficult to write less but say more, and the bulk of this book shows just how much effort was avoided.

It is a shame, because a book this ambitious is needed for PHP, but it really only provides a model of what NOT to do. I am out of pocket, disappointed, and will try to recover something (if not my dignity) on Ebay.

No doubt, I am thus sorely disappointed in the Wiley Technology Publishing's promise of "Timely. Practical. Reliable." printed on both the front and back cover.

This book is anything but practical, and definitely not reliable. It could have been timely, but by the time you get the code working, it is too late to do anything useful with it. Don't waste your good money and time supporting this sloppy effort.

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