About 'Professional PHP programming'
English is not my native tongue, nor pen, so 'sowwy in advance' for any mistakes...
I've just finished the Wrox 'Professional PHP programming' and I must say that, although I've learned some things from it, the title is kind of misleading...
There are some errors in the writing, but what bothered me the most, was that it didn't seem that 'professional' to me, this critique, of course is not towards the writers (I suppose they are quite professional), but to the book itself.
For example, I've read nothing about time-functions (mktime(), etc...) which I think is rather important (for browsing an online agenda for example).
I thought the case studies would be great, just to follow the construction of a whole application from the bottom up, but with the first case study, I already noticed, this wasn't going to be what I expected, I quote from case study 1, shopping cart application, p.554:
Quote:
The transactions of the user should be secure. That is, some basic authentication mechanism will be built into the application, so as to prevent unauthorized persons from making transactions on a iser's behalf. In real life applications SSL or some other encryption mechanism is used to prevent the viewing of sensitive information (like credit card numbers etc.), that is sent by the browser to the web server. But to keep this application somple, we will not be covering these issues!
I mean, development-case-studies of professional, real life applications was what I expected...
In the shopping cart application itself, they do the login by sending a plain cookie containing username and password!
So for me 'Intermediate PHP scribbling with the intention to become a professional php programmer' would have been a better, albeit not that catchy, title...