Sams Publishing: The Phrasebook Collection

I get a lot of books to review. Currently the stack is about waist high and UPS hasn’t been here this morning. So in an effort to trim down that stack of books, I’m going to talk about books 4 in one review.

Sams publishing has release four “Phrasebooks” for developers:

• PHP Phrasebook – Christian Wenz
• MySQL Phrasebook – Zak Greant & Chris Newman
• JavaScript Phrasebook – Christian Wenz
• Apache Phrasebook – Daniel Lopez

The concept is simple. There are times when you just need a simple fix, not a complete chapter on the theory behind the fix. This book series looks to fill that niche. From the looks of these four books, they do succeed.

JavaScript Phrasebook

Let’s start with the last one I received, JavaScript Phrasebook. Christian Wenz does a great job with this one, even if he does include the “Brief History” chapter. (Actually, it’s only part of a chapter.) He sets the tone of the book well in the introduction.

This book is no cookbook with long and inflexible solutions to short problems.

While I’m not down on cookbooks, I’ve got a brand new on in the pile to review. Sometimes you just need a quick answer to what seems like a difficult problem.

Christian does a great job of presenting solutions to problems like:

• Reading and writing cookies
• Validating Forms
• Sending and receiving data via XMLHttpRequest (AJAX)
• Centering a pop-up on the screen

and other topics. You can see from the sampling I’ve taken here that the topics covered in the book are useful. I would recommend this book highly to two groups of developers. Middle-tier/backend developers who have to occasionally work with JavaScript. Web designers who want to be able to solve problems in JavaScript without having to get a developer involved. (My wife, the lovely and talented Kathy, is a web designer and she tells me that the worst part of her job is having to get a developer involved in a project for a simple piece of JavaScript code)

MySQL Phrasebook

The thinnest of the 4 books, weighing in at only 181 page, the MySQL Phrasebook is none-the-less a good reference if you don’t do MySQL every day. Zak and Chris do a good job pf presenting the concepts clearly and concisely. They are very clear in the Introduction about the goals of the book and specifically list the things the book does not cover:

• Installation and Configuration
• MaxDB or MySQL Cluster
• Detailed coverage of MySQL’s features
• Advanced Topics

They do however, dedicate chapters to:

• Creating Databases, Tables and Indexes
• Storing Data
• Simple Queries
• The MySQL command line client

There is also a chapter dedicated to the various APIs. We here at DevZone are mainly concerned with the PHP API. If you, like many developers, work in multiple languages, you’ll be glad to know that they cover the APIs for C and Perl as well.

Apache Phrasebook

The cover of the Apache Phrasebook lists Daniel Lopez as the author, however on the inside cover, Jesus Blanco is also listed. Just to be safe, we’ll mention both of them.

Unlike it’s MySQL sibling, the Apache Phrasebook does cover installing and configuring. Well, covering is a bit strong, it mentions it. Like the other topics in the series, it gives you the minimum you need to get started. If you’ve never installed Apache before, this isn’t the guide you want. (I’m doing the Jedi mind trick here…) However, if you’ve done it before, understand everything and just need a quick refresher, this will do the trick. Out of all the Phrasebooks in the series,

Maybe it’s just because I find the configuring Apache more daunting than crafting a SQL Select statement but it seems to me that the Apache Phrasebook covers more advanced topics. They talking about things like

• SSL/TLS
• Virtual Hosting
• Security

These all seem to be more on the advanced side to me. I’m sure those of you who do Apache day in and day out will disagree with me but that’s the beauty of the Phrasebook series. It helps you fill in the gaps of your knowledge.

PHP Phrasebook

Finally, we will look at the Phrasebook that most of us are interested in, the PHP Phrasebook. This is the thickest of the four and again is written by Christian Wenz. Sometimes a phrase (solution) can’t be a simple page. This is especially true in the PHP Phrasebook. Some of the solutions that Christian presents, like the “Checking Selection Lists”. This solution covers 3 pages and one of those is sample code. Most however, are like in the other books and limited to a page to a page and a half.

Chapter 8 in the PHP Phrasebook, “Using XML” is worth the price of the book. Whether you use PHP 4 or PHP 5, this chapter covers all the basics. There’s even a section on SimpleXML in PHP 5. (My personal favorite) Christian does not, however, stop there. There’s a chapter on accessing databases that covers most of the common APIs, Strings, Dates and Arrays as well. I’d say this would be a great one to keep in your back pocket but at 309 pages, it’s a bit to hefty.

Conclusion

For what they are designed to be, a quick, handy reference guide, these books are right on the mark. I would have preferred that each “Phrase” start on a separate page just to make it a bit easier to find but that’s really a minor criticism.

Don’t look for answers to difficult problems in this series of books. These books have simple and short answers to a lot of problems that plague developers constantly. They present the answers in such a manner that no matter how hard you thought the problem was, once you see their answer, you realize it wasn’t that hard at all.

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