I have five, maybe six PHP books laying around. They're usefulness has dwindled to nothing more than the occaisonal coaster.. or wedge to keep a window open. The sad truth is they're all written relatively the same way. I have so many because I wanted to learn more about advanced stuff and how to build a mail client- all the really neat stuff that you can do with PHP. And when I was first getting in PHP I thought that having many different examples of how to do something would be useful. To my dismay few of the books elaborated much on the more advanced stuff (not to be all bad, there were a few decent examples). Mostly the ones that did said little and did little more than reproduce the manual pages in printed form, lists of functions and what arguments they took... but I was always saying to myself but how in the hell does the function *work* in a real application??? So after $150 +/- in books I realized the web was the better source for information. Everything you would want to know about any language is out there *somewhere*. I would still rather have the printed form, something you could take anywhere, write in, flip through.. but computer books suck and rarely have enough information on what you want to do!

One example I can think of is the PHP 4 Bible, I bought it because I thought it had some examples of how to build a fully-featured mail client. After reading the chapter I discoved that the authors felt that a mail client was far too complex to show an example of. Here's a quote from the chapter:

"Implementing (a mail client) from scratch.. In a word: Don't. We're not joking. The only conceivable reason to re-implement from scratch at this point is for a university project, in which case you don't need someone to explain how to do it because you want to think through it for yourself..."

OK, I'm a student of PHP, why in the name of all good things would I expect a PHP BOOK to teach me PHP?? If I bloody well want to know how a PHP mail client is built then there is nothing wrong with wanting to do that... and after learning how to do it, it wasn't as freaking complicated as they made it out to be. Maybe I don't *want* to use any of the open-source solutions already out there. Maybe if I pay $35 for this f'ed up book I expect it to demonstrate a mail client and not tell me why I shouldn't do it. Yes it's reinventing the wheel, but I don't care, I just want to know how to do it!

They go on to make open-source suggestions and suggest free email service providers. I don't want to be a microsoft or yahoo clone! I don't want to use their services and I don't want to have to visit their sites to read my email!

Ok sorry about that, getting off on a rant there! So my advice is maybe they're not *all* bad, but should definitely be taken with a grain of salt and I would use discretion and exhaust all other means before shelling out $30 for another book.

Good articles, Nik, thanks for posting them.

: )
Rich

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Smiling Souls
http://www.smilingsouls.net
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