The Open Source Zone

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.

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.<p>Example: p. 50 shows this code segment<p><?php
$a=23;
$b=34;
if ($a > $b)
{
echo 'a is higher than b';
}
else
{
echo 'b is higher than a';
}
?><p>The merest child, although evidently not SAMS technical editors, can see the elementary error here, which occurs when $a = $b.<p>Example: p. 53 shows this code segment<p><?php
$a=18;
$b=19;
if ($a xor $b)
{
echo '$a and $b are the same';
}
else
{
echo '$a and $b are not the same';
}
?><p>with the comment that the code will return "$a and $b are not the same".<p>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?<p>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.

I knew nothing about PHP or SQL before getting this book and I have had little programming experience. I found it pretty well suited to my needs. O'Reilly's Programming PHP on the other hand was too advanced and not written as a beginners text. I did find the O'Reilly book useful however as the PHP and PostgreSQL.... has a lot of coding errors that are very confusing. Hopefully these will be dealt with in the second edition. While I have some problems with the book I think there isn't a good alternative for someone at my level.

Very well laid out, well written, contains all information needed to make your PostGreSQL and PHP project a success.

Nothing new here, said in 800 pages. You are much better off to get Julie Meloni's work on PHP and Jeff Perkins book on Postgres.