At 2003-06-16 10:24 -0400, Mark McCulligh wrote: >I have been asked to teach an introduction course on PHP/MySQL at my local >College. > >I am looking for a good beginner book for the course. Like most people I >learned PHP from php.net and online tutorials. But I need a book for the >course. > >I am looking for a book that is not too long also. Around 500-600 pages >would be great. I can't give my students 150 pages every night to read, for >books like "PHP and MySQL Web Development" by Luke Welling, Laura Thomson >even know they are great they are just to long. It is only a 35 hour course >for only can cover the basics. > >Plus something that covers version 4.2 or greater. I don't want to teach >them old syntax. > >If anyone knows for a good beginner book, please let me know, thanks. >Mark.
Lately I tend to buy only O'Reilly books (when I buy books at full price). O'Reilly books are generally concise, clear, to the point and O'Reilly tends only to publish a book about a subject when it makes sense. Often they are written by the author of the language himself. What I don't like in a book is: - Too big font size. - Looking-ahead, looking-back and summary paragraphs and paragraphs patronizing the reader about that it wasn't as hard as he had thought etc. (Like a large part of most of the 'For Dummies' books seems to consist of. I was stupid enough to buy the XML for Dummies book lately). - Exercises (but that may be different for educational purposes). - Repetitive texts (it's hard to avoid any repetition, but the author should really try. Of course he also may not refer to things that come later on in a tutorial. - Too many and too big examples. - An added CD-ROM purely as a sales argument. Not that I care much about it, I hardly never look on them, because they are generally very outdated and I am usually not going to try out the examples in the book. O'Reilly does these things usually right. Some of the O'Reilly books that I thought were not perfect: - All books about Perl. Now that we have nice c-like script languages like PHP, Python and Javascript who still wants to study the mess that Perl is? - The introduction to Ruby, probably called Ruby in a Nutshell. I had read the introductory article in DrDobbs by the author of the language and the language seemed nice, but whilst reading the book I noticed more and more cases of half-Perl ugliness. The language Ruby was designed by a Japanese and a lot of Japanese designs are flawed by being a seemingly random combination of aspects from Western designs. - The Java in a Nutshell book. It consisted mainly of a collection of standard library functions but with to few details to be of any use. I propose that when looking for a book on a certain subject: - You check out if there is an O'Reilly book about it and when not, why not? - Compare any other book you encounter with the O'Reilly book and see if it is better. It might happen in selected cases. By the way, I think that the online PHP-manual at php.net is very good so I have no need for a PHP book, except that I once bought O'Reilly's PHP Kort en Krachtig (the Dutch translation of the PHP Pocket Reference, probably the first version of 2000). Of course I would have bought the English version if it had been in stock here. The Dutch translations of computer books are often very flawed, plus that it's useful to learn the English terms. Greetings, Jaap -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
