PHP and PostgreSQL Advanced Web Programming

Book Description

Sams' PHP and MySQL Web Development, by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson, showed that there is a strong demand for books that describe how to use PHP together with a specific open-source database to develop Web applications.

While MySQL is very popular, PostgreSQL is widely considered to be the more powerful of the two open-source databases. And PostgreSQL is rapidly gaining market share large organizations are beginning to use PostgreSQL instead of Oracle; the demand for PostgreSQL training and support has increased by some accounts 50% in the last six months; and Web hosting services increasingly offer PostgreSQL along with MySQL.

PHP and PostgreSQL Advanced Web Programming focuses on the specific needs of a PostgreSQL developer and will detail how to make use of PostgreSQL's unique, advanced features to develop high-availability, fail-safe Web applications with PHP and PostgreSQL.

Reviews From AMAZON.COM

excellent practical guide

Dispite some minor discrepencies pointed out by another reviewer, the information in this book is very useful. If you want to build complex database web applications with PHP, then Postgres is the right RDBMS to use and this book is the right book to guide you. Well worth the money.

One star is too many: don't buy this book.

It's hard to argue than any book has absolutely zero value: even the world's worst book (and this one may be in the running) probably contains some useful information. However, in a worthwhile book, I expect to find a good deal of useful information, and more than that, I expect not to find false information. There are enough errors in the first 60 pages of this book that I am not going to bother reading the rest of it.

Example: p. 50 shows this code segment

$a=23;
$b=34;
if ($a > $b)
{
echo 'a is higher than b';
}
else
{
echo 'b is higher than a';
}
?>

The merest child, although evidently not SAMS technical editors, can see the elementary error here, which occurs when $a = $b.

Example: p. 53 shows this code segment

$a=18;
$b=19;
if ($a xor $b)
{
echo '$a and $b are the same';
}
else
{
echo '$a and $b are not the same';
}
?>

with the comment that the code will return "$a and $b are not the same".

If the author's earlier comment, that "False is returned if both values are the same", is correct, then this is obviously backwards, but beyond that, what is the basis of the comparison? In other languages I'm familiar with, XOR compares two Boolean values, or possibly performs a bitwise comparison on byte values. Are the authors telling us that in PHP XOR performs the same function as the inequality operator? Or is it that in PHP even numbers are True and odd numbers are False? Or what?

The most likely explanation is that this example is simply garbage, and I strongly suspect that the rest of the book, which I no longer intend to read, is the same. I don't know much about PHP, which is why I bought the book, but I know enough about other programming languages to know that I can't have any faith in what this book tells me.