No Starch Press was kind enough to send me a review copy of this book when I asked for another book that hasn't been released yet (I seem to be asking for unreleased titles with increasing frequency), it arrived last week, I finished it today.


I'll get this out of the way up front; I approached this book with a completely inaccurate perception of what it was going to give me. I would consider myself an intermediate to advanced php developer, and I was hoping this book would teach me awesome ways to use PHP5's OOP power to make my applications better, faster, and more attractive to women. That wasn't what this book does. This book introduces OOP, explains why it's useful, and goes through to develop several sample applications to demonstrate OOPs power, and more importantly how to use it.


The books pretty thin (compared to the weighty tomes currently bending my bookshelf) weighing in at 216 pages, split up amongst 15 chapters. The first bit of the book concentrates on explaining what OOP is, why PHP needs it, and why you want it. It then moves on to explain why OOP sucked in PHP4, what works better in PHP5, and all the fancy new words you're going to need to memorize to use it (protected, private, etc.). It then moves on to develop a sample indexing application, adding in thumbnail generation as the book progresses. Later on more advanced topics like design patterns, interfaces and exceptions are introduced. Finally the book gives a brief introduction to SPL which was introduced in PHP5 and improved in PHP5.1.


I have two technical complaints with this book, well one really the other one's just false advertising. First, it annoyed the heck out of me when the typeface and font-size changes midway through a paragraph, this only happens with the intro paragraph, but it still bugged me. Second the back cover advertises that they have sexy new technology that keeps your book from flapping closed when you leave it open on your desk, my desk appears to be incompatible.


Overall I would recommend this book to beginner PHP developers, or intermediate developers who have not yet gotten their feet wet with OO.



Details:

Cost: $29.95 (list price)

Type: Trade cover (paperback)

Length: 216 pages, 15 chapters

Buy from Amazon: Object-Oriented PHP ($18.87)