Comments about oreilly Upgrading to PHP 5:

I was impressed by the clarity and conciseness of this little book. It was a pleasure to read and I had no problems identifying the places that I did not have to read on the first reading, or that were related to PHP 4 and did not need to study fully.

The examples about PHP 4 (that are then recreated in PHP 5) are carefully chosen to explain how the new language makes things easier and/or more effective and modular with PHP 5. This didactic device is very useful for people that have worked extensively on PHP 4.

This is clearly not a book for people that are just begining on PHP or for those that have little experience on PHP 4. It is better for them to learn from a PHP 5 book (Learning PHP 5 maybe?) directly. However I'd recommend anyone on that situation to then come back and give this book a careful look since many topics are explained here better than in many other places in the literature.

I was especially fond of the chapters on XML, Iterators, and Streams and Wrappers. However all the other chapters were very helpful and I can see myself coming back many times in the future for clarifications on fine point on OO programming, MySQLi, or Error Handling.

One of the best O'Reilly books I own.

Comments about oreilly Upgrading to PHP 5:

As I haven't had any regular computer programming studies, this book which doesn't take anything for granted was perfetct for me.

I liked more: the mysql chapter, XML and error handling. But also very very good is chapter 10 (PHP in action): a small programming example.

I liked also the smaller size: 15x23 cm versus 18x23.5, which is more comfortable for people who read it in train.

Comments about oreilly Upgrading to PHP 5:

I purchased this book as I was using PHP 4 books to lean how to program PHP 5.

The chapters that caused me to make the purchase were on OOP. It was the best PHP 5 OOP overview I have seen. A bit concise, but covered all the ground I wanted in as few pages as possible.

This is not an exhaustive reference, nor a hand holding tutorial. However it does provide enough clear background on the new features that the PHP documentation starts to make sense.

Thanks for a great book.

hooda

Comments about oreilly Upgrading to PHP 5:

Disapointing. The book seems confused, often spending more time telling you about PHP4 workarounds than the PHP5 way of doing things (Should it have been called Downgrading to PHP4?).

Examples are not clearly labelled, meaning that if you dip into this book you may end up applying these PHP4 methods when the whole point is to avoid them. Chapters are very poorly organised, meaning you aren't going to want to sit down and read it.

I found the chapter on OOP particularly confusing. The discussion of constructors and destructors was scattered around the chapter, as was the discussion of public, private and protected methods and properties. Code examples weren't clearly PHP4 or PHP5, either through labelling, the context in the text, and worst of all many that seemed to be examples of PHP4 use mysqli functions that aren't available in PHP4.

Sorry, but this book feels like a dud to me. O'Reilly should be updating Programming PHP and the PHP Pocket Reference, rather than selling this book.

My copy is on the way back to Amazon.