Beginning PHP and PostgreSQL 8

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• 

  disappointing

  usually apress books are good. very good. i love them. this one .. i don't know. there's lot of good stuff, and lame errors. and since these are, mostly, things that an editor or a reviewer should catch, i wonder what happened. this is a book for beginners, supposedly. i'm not, but i think these kin ... (continue)

  usually apress books are good. very good. i love them. this one .. i don't know. there's lot of good stuff, and lame errors. and since these are, mostly, things that an editor or a reviewer should catch, i wonder what happened. this is a book for beginners, supposedly. i'm not, but i think these kind of mistakes are hard on beginners.
  let me just give you some examples.

  1. use of var in OOP

  since PHP5, the use of var is deprecated. the only place where you'd find it is in the historical introduction:
  "once upon a time PHP4 brought us a lite form of OOP. then came PHP5 and almost made it right. at that time var was used. now it's an alias for public. DON'T USE IT."
  that's it. instead, there are lots of examples with var.
  this could just be me.

  2. mistake with exception
  there's a nice explanation (i'm serious) about when and how to use exception. few books have it. then, in just one example, everything is messed up. in this example, the most generic handler comes first in the try-catch, rendering every other kind of exception useless. and, in order not to let beginners understand, both branches of the catch do the same thing (so you don't really see which is being used).

  3. getting ridiculous with dates
  there's an example about dates, when march is tested for leap year (the code tests if march 29 exists in a particular year: why would it not exists?

  4. in postgresql copy command examples
  there are 2 example showing the use of the 'delimiter' option, one with the delimiter between hyphens, the other one without.

  there's more than this, but the one i wrote about kind of irritate me.
  also i don't like when code has errors that make it clearly look wrong even without understanding what the code does (like missing semicolons, missing closing parenthesis or quotes). i found many of these, and again, it could be hard for beginners to spot them.

  overall, i would say that the title is misleading. you're not going to go from novice to professional. the book is to big to swallow for a novice, and has bad advice. for instance, in the postgrsql there's a lengthy discussion about building your own 'abstraction' class (ok, like there aren't enough). the reasoning is that if you change the database you're using, you just rework the abstraction class and you're set. right.
  and what does he call the class? pgsql. why would you name and abstraction class with the name of the database you're using? call it sql, database, db, mydb, mydatabase, supercalifragilistichespiralidoso, but not pgsql!.

  the book is little shy of 800 pages. it covers triggers, rules, functions, but doesn't even mention objects. isn't one of postresql peculiarities? and how about storing arrays?

  Is this helpful?

  Andrew "Ender" Wiggin said on Nov 17, 2011 | Add your feedback

Book Details

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• English Books
• Paperback 896 Pages
• Edition: 1
• ISBN-10: 1590595475
• ISBN-13: 9781590595473
• Publisher: Apress
• Pub date: Feb 27, 2006
• Dimensions: 1484 mm x 1226 mm x 258 mm Just how big is that?

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