PHP is a simple yet powerful open source scripting language that has become a big player in web development. Over a million web sites, from large corporate sites to small personal sites, are using PHP to serve dynamic web content. PHP's broad feature set, approachable syntax, and support for different operating systems and web servers make it an ideal language for rapid web development. The PHP Cookbook is a collection of problems, solutions, and practical examples for PHP programmers. The book contains a unique and extensive collection of best practices for everyday PHP programming dilemmas. For every problem addressed in the book, there's a worked-out solution or "recipe" -- short, focused pieces of code that you can insert directly into your applications. But this book offers more than cut-and-paste code. You also get explanations of how and why the code works, so you can learn to adapt the problem-solving techniques to similar situations. The recipes in the PHP Cookbook range from simple tasks, such as sending a database query and fetching URLs, to entire programs that demonstrate complex tasks, such as printing HTML tables and generating bar charts. This book contains over 250 recipes on the following topics:

• Working with basic data types, including strings, numbers, dates and times, and arrays

• PHP building blocks, such as variables, functions, classes, and objects

• Web programming, including forms, database access, and XML

• Useful features like regular expressions, encryption and security, graphics, internationalization and localization, and Internet services

• Working with files and directories

• Command-line PHP and PHP-GTK

• PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository

This book contains an impressive collection of useful code for PHP programmers, from novices to advanced practitioners. Instead of poking around mailing lists, online documentation, and other sources, you can rely on the PHP Cookbook to provide quick solutions to common problems, so you can spend your time on those out-of-the-ordinary problems specific to your application.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 40 Ratings

Terrific reference! - 2008-11-25
Reviewer Rating:
I'll keep this short - I love this book. It's come in handy more times than I can count. It contains great solutions to plenty of real world problems. I keep my copy at work, but plan on buying another copy to keep at home. I highly recommend this book.

Use it every day I program with PHP - 2009-09-28
Reviewer Rating:
This is an indispensable tool for PHP programmers! There are so many great, no BS examples in here. There are about 24 chapters, each with about 10 to 15 examples. I found the Files and Directories sections to be very chock full of information. The Array and Form sections are great too.

This book is not for beginners, because as I said, most of the fluff has been cut out and each recipe is only 1 - 3 pages long. However, if you have a strong background in other languages, then once you learn PHP's syntax (which is similar to C), this book is a great reference for when you need to look up how to do something specific. It's a lot easier than looking it up on PHP's online manual (which I have to say is excellent; thanks PHP!)

There are also a few mini programs that are excellent, like a "Tiny Wiki".

My only quam (spelling?) with this book is that the Database section doesn't cover the mysql and mysqli extensions. But, these functions are simple enough that you can just look them up anywhere.

If you do any PHP programming, then you need this book!

Fantastic job David and Adam!

Dog-eared, tattered & torn - 2009-02-09
Reviewer Rating:
I bought about 25-30 PHP/MySQL books while learning & this was easily one of my top 5 most used. Programming PHP (Oreilly) and PHP 5 in Practice (Developer's Library) are also pretty solid. If you're ready for MySQL, replace the latter with PHP and MySQL Web Development (4th Edition, Developer's Library). I also found the Apress books fairly helpful. Definitely get the Cookbook, though. You'll reference it whenever you code.

PHP cooks - this is your recipe book - 2009-01-25
Reviewer Rating:
Not much to say other than that this book continues the O'Reilly's legacy of top books for self learning.

Useful recipes - 2008-12-21
Reviewer Rating:
PHP is intended for rapid web development, and it does not take that long to get comfortable with the language itself. However, it is a fairly flexible language, which allows for several ways to do the same thing but perhaps one way is definitely better than others; it takes time to learn the best practices. With PHP, it is easy to produce spaghetti codes if you are not careful, while it is certainly possible to make very solid object-oriented systems as well. The best way to learn in the end is to read a lot of well-written codes by capable, programmers with experiences, but for a developer who needs to code tons of stuff and has pressure to meet deadlines, time is precious. That is why this book is useful.

Much of PHP is specially designed for web development, so the book includes a lot of essential topics dealing with web development: XML, security, dealing with form data, i18n and l10n, database, and so on. In software development, new releases are norm, and some topics discussing actively developed modules do show their ages at times. However, there are still a lot you can learn from the standard O'Reilly quality book, rather than collecting hodge podge of information available on the web.

If you know some other language already and have read one or two introductory PHP web development book already, this will be the most used book on the shelve about PHP. This book and the official online documentation gets you quite far. In my case this has been easily the most used PHP book.

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