Thanks to the OP for the interest in the book and to everyone else for
their input. So here's what happened, from the writer/horse's mouth:
It was time to write an update to the book because the second edition
had been out for 3+ years or so, I think. It wasn't a money-making
effort (i.e., get people to buy another copy) but rather a touch-up to
make sure it's current enough. I had to make some decisions about what
versions to support; the previous edition supported both PHP 4 and 5.
PHP 6 was more than 50% complete at the time I started writing it and
I thought the Unicode support was a pretty big deal, this being an
ever-increasing global web...marketplace...blah...blah...blah. So I
wanted to start thinking along those lines and as I didn't know when
the fourth edition of the book would be written, I thought I'd get an
early jump on PHP 6. Yes, PHP 6 wasn't nearly finalized at the time
and no hosting companies were using it, but many hosting companies are
still using PHP 4 and PHP 6 *is* available for playing around with. So
that was my reasoning. In the end, only a bit more than one chapter
_requires_ PHP 6 and I do like looking a bit into the future of Web
development and PHP. Also, as I don't discuss OOP in this book (gasp!,
I leave that to my more advanced PHP book because a decent discussion
of OOP requires at least 150 pages and I'd need to cut out more
important topics to include it in this book), some of the features
being discussed in PHP 6 weren't problematic for the book one way or
the other (like namespaces, which ended up on PHP 5.3). Again, the
Unicode support was my main thinking.
Two years later, had I known PHP 6 still wouldn't be out, I probably
wouldn't have touched it at all and I do feel a bit sheepish about
having a book out there on PHP 6 when PHP 6 isn't out there (for
production purposes), but these things do happen to books,
particularly with open-source projects that have no need to adhere to
deadlines. Still, I would like to think that at worst, 10% of the
material isn't usable today on production servers but still has a
philosophical benefit. To atone for my prematurity, I do try to
support the book as much as possible, I try to talk about all this
versioning stuff in publish ways (like on the Amazon page for the
book), and I don't think there's anything wrong with someone buying
the second edition if they're a bit concerned about the PHP 6 thing.
(In theory, I guess someone could, um, buy another writer's book, but
I prefer to plead ignorance of such outcomes.) We--the publisher and
I--also did consciously change the title of the book from "PHP and
MySQL for Dynamic..." to "PHP 6 and MySQL 5 for Dynamic..." to
indicate the distinctions being made.
Sorry for the length, but I hope that helps. And thanks again.
Larry
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