Small, easy and general PHP programming book

Question

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What's a good book for learning PHP?

Is there on earth a good and small book about PHP. I don't want that 1,400 PHP book that teaches me each PHP function aside and then talk about creating a project in 10 pages. I'm looking for a PHP book that teaches you how:

• General, short intro. about PHP
• OOP in PHP
• MVC pattern or other patterns
• MySql
• Create a small application/service using PHP
• tools like FirePHP...

So it shouldn't go beyond 400 pages, I'm really bored with the heavy +1K pages that has much information that I don't need for the moment.

Answer 1

I like the free videos that Leigh offers at www.phpvideotutorials.com.

Answer 2

Have you looked at online documentation for various frameworks? That's your MVC stuff right there.

Otherwise, here's a couple of resources:

• MySQL with PHP
• PHP Objects
• Blog in PHP (on CodeIgniter)

I generally wouldn't use FirePHP, I use error_log. MVC in PHP is MVC in any language. You have "Models" which model data, these can interact with the database or be plain objects, "Views" which take information and display it (no logic) and a "Controller" gluing it together.

User request => Controller => Needs information? (=> Models) => View

Answer 3

For my introduction to PHP, I read the book Sam's Teach Yourself PHP in 10 minutes. Although I doubt that you will be able to learn PHP in 10 minutes, it is nonetheless a good book. It's a farely small book; it seems almost like a novel.

It covers the basics of PHP, and it also dabbles a bit into MySQL. In addition, it explains how to setup PHP on your own Apache server (not an issue anymore with packages such as XAMPP, but still a good reference if you're curious)

Here's the book on Amazon if you're curious:

http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-PHP-Minutes/dp/0672327627

After I completed this book, I didn't use any more books to learn the above. PHP has a great documentation, and you can look up tutorials on how to do what you need to do on a case-by-case basis.

Answer 4

You want all of those bullet points in less than 400 pages? Good luck. PHP is a topic in itself. OOP is a topic in itself.

Sure, you could put them all together in one book, but you'd only ever touch the surface of each topic.