I think we are all smart enough to have PHP5 installed... and further, I don't think anybody in their right minds would purchase ANY language book with "Professional" in the title without some prior knowledge of the language. The truth is I haven't even purchased this book. I bought Beginning PHP5 which is chock full of the same type of errors. I went to the store to see what Pro PHP5 was like... "Maybe it doesn't have as many errors," I thought to myself. Too bad within the first few pages there are grammatical errors (which was the first sign in Beg. PHP5). I downloaded some of the code for Pro PHP5 and sure enough, the same sort of mistakes came up. Too bad.

I think I'll add that the lack of any sort of convention is perhaps my biggest complaint.
Sometimes it's strict UML capitalising (which I like), sometimes it's all lowercase w/ underscores, other times they capitalise the first letter of methods...
Man!
You get the feeling this was put together in a hurry, which is a shame, as I think the concepts they deal w/ are very important -- unfortunately it's taking me so long to make use of them (w/ all the errors & all the rest) that I really wish I'd bought another book!
   doug.

Common sense is what tells you the world is flat.

This book is the first and last I buy from Wrox. I actually wanted something from O'Reilly, but there wasn't anything in the shops I went to.

I agree with most users here. There are all kinds of mistakes, mixed coding styles, deprecated functions in use...

I was reporting errors to Wrox but, after reading this forum, saw it is pointless, as they are not interested in providing quality.

My suggestion is that you regard this book as an overview of the topics you have to pay attention to when programming with objects. Thus, your investment will not be completely lost and you can dig into the topics that are especially interesting to you by reading other material (on- or offline). PHP 5, UML and MVC, for instance, are subjects that need to be treated in a book by themselves.

As a newbie, the numerous syntax errors are annoying. Not much of the code works the first time. I have done a lot of debugging of syntax if you can count that as a positive. Some code I gave up on and moved on.

The code and design stlye inconsistencies are really annoying. Take for example CH3, "Putting objects to work". I mean what is the purpose of this chapter, it is kind of totally isolated, and seems one of the authors was just thrown in the mix to show off. And then, you come to CH7, "Generic object class". Arent these two chapters kind of conflicting with each other as to their approach to handling object entities? I just wish there were fewer goddam authors, who were more able to collaborate on the consistency of the approach towards showing us a "professional" set of solutions that harness the power of PHP5. INstead we get a mish mash of ideas that conflict, create confusion, and illustrate poor coding and design practice, with no common approach.

I really tried to give this book a chance, and by and large the ideas are really good, but their implementation and teaching is total crapola. What happened to Wrox? Seems these days any numpty with an idea about OOP in PHP5 feels empowered to teach it. pLease can we have a good goddam PHP5 book for once!!!!

This has got to be one of the worst books I've every purchased from Wrox! Who are these bozos, and who let them call themselves PROFESSIONALS? They don't even follow their own philosophy! There doesn't seem to be a single thing you can use from one chapter to the next, that you could truly call reusable parts! I thought we were building some sort of foundation of classes that would eventually be used in the final chapters... like generic objects, the database abstraction layers and the MVC model objects. Instead, everything goes out the window, and we start with a completely different approach for the sales force application?

This book is completely useless. Hardly any of the scripts work, most of the code is not included with the code download, no useful instructions in the chapters. The examples are mostly not complete.

Also why is the book programmed in MySQL???

~ ME (jontyw) :)

I sent a comment to the publisher and I'll repost it here.

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I am extremely disappointed with my purchase of Wrox' Beginning PHP5 book. (ISBN: 0-7645-5783-1) I cannot even begin to recount all the errors I've located in this book. Was this book ever QCd? It's surprising that this book seems to have not been edited at all! It's loaded with grammatical errors for starters, and that's not even the bad part. The code depicted in this book (which is meant to teach beginners with little/no technical experience, by the way) is horribly inconsistent and in some cases completely wrong! I actually laughed when I got to the chapters entitled "Healthy and Robust Code" and "Writing High-Quality Code".

Something else that bothered me about this book is that it uses, and attempts to teach an out-of-date standard of HTML. The most recent standards were set and implemented well before this book was published and should be the standards used and taught.

Seriously, people. Whoever passed this through QC should be fired and beaten. This actually annoyed me enough to write a freakin' letter. I never write letters. I can't imagine the frustrations people have very likely endured while reading this book.

~Brian

P.S. Why the hell does a beginner's programming book need six authors? That's probably one of the reasons this piece is such a pile.

Yes. We all know about the errors. This is the weakest aspect of the book.

The authors must put a lot of attention in the next edition.
But not because these errors, it means that the book is bad. Actually I think is a very nice book. Of course, it is not for the php newcomers. And yes, is totally out of context if somebody complains that the book doesn't explain how the explode function works!

In that case, I recommend begging php, which is also a great book.

This book is about OOP, design patterns, and other professional stuff, for programmers ready to make the next step.

Alright, this is where i came to understand that the author(s) of this book have some serious holes in their working knowledge of PHP. Heres an excerpt from code in chapter 13 on MVC:
Are the authors trying to look fancy or something? Why on earth would anyone want to loop through a perfectly plain array using for()?

Consider the difference in complexity;
Wrox: for ($i=0; $i<=sizeof($arSteaks)-1; $i++) {
Any sane coder: foreach($arSteaks as $key=>$value)

Furthermore, when implementing constraints on their request object, they do this:
Yes, that's the alphabet, repeated in both lower and upper case. Am i the only one feeling that a regex function might be easier for this, not to mention a lot less prone to error?

This is immature coding, and it really made me loose faith in not only the reliability of the examples in this book, but also the methodology that is presented.

It's one thing to end up printing code in a book that ultimately yields syntax errors, it is however a totally different thing to print code that parses correctly but in turn causes total and utter disbelief in the authors ability, not to mention experience, in the field of PHP.

Truly, this book covers more advanced topics than what i have yet to touch in-depth, but this backwards methodology on the most basic of subjects is definitively tempting me to get an alternative resource for learning the more complex methods of PHP.