Help Me Buy Some Books

• 14th February 2006 at 12:05

I'm about two weeks away from finishing the bulk of my Flash work, so I'm looking for some new books to support the things I'll be starting after that - google's nice, but it only goes so far. I thought I'd ask you for suggestions and recommendations - any help you can give me would be appreciated!

First up, PHP. I should say that I'm looking at PHP 4 - I'm thinking it still has a wider install base than PHP 5, and as long as I write well, it should work in PHP 5 too.

Efficient PHP. I have recently been testing the efficiency of different approaches to solving the same problem, by running variations of algorithms on test data and timing them. This is good, but is time-consuming and not foolproof. I'm after a book that would discuss the speed merits of avoiding the use of objects, details of when to use case instead of if, things like that to save me wasting time figuring it all out myself. And although I have my own ideas, I'm also interested in reading about what other people do in terms of caching and increasing the performance of PHP (without load-balanced servers and caching proxies).

PHP security. I've been developing server-side scripts for over 8 years now, so I'd like to think I have a good understanding of how to ensure they are secure. I have read through the online chapters of Essential PHP Security and they didn't have anything new in them, but I figure a more advanced book might show me a few tricks that I've missed. Although most server-side script security issues are going to be the same between languages, focusing on PHP might also help me avoid some PHP "features" that I haven't come across yet.

PHP documentation. I hesitated writing this because the online documentation is very good, and is supported by user comments, which are occasionally quite useful. However, it can never hurt to have a book sitting next to the keyboard.

Those three don't necessarily have to come in three separate books of course. I've had a look at the following:

• Advanced PHP Programming - sounds like it might be good for the optimisation stuff, and it covers SOAP etc too which is a bonus
• Essential PHP Security - the chapters I've read were a bit basic, but perhaps those were just the only ones I already knew ;) Cheap enough to be an acceptable risk, but is there something better?
• PHP in a Nutshell - Perl in a Nutshell was great for quick reference, and this one sounds good.

Then there's MySQL. I've done quite a bit with it, but I don't think I could say I ever really mastered it. The databases course at uni didn't help, but perhaps that was the lecturer - wasn't he taken off teaching duty after that? Like PHP, the online documentation is pretty good and I can do what I want to do, but I wonder if it might be worth getting a good book - I'm sure there are good practices I'm not following, or features I'm missing. Perhaps the PHP books I get will already cover everything I need, but perhaps a MySQL book would be good too:

• MySQL in a Nutshell - looks like a long list of commands with no overall concept discussion, but am I wrong?
• High Performance MySQL - I like the sound of the stuff on indexing and query optimisation, but the rest of the book is beyond what I'm currently after; no load-balancing or replication for me just yet.

Have you noticed that I like O'Reilly books? I'm happy to get something from another publisher, it's just there are so many and I know that O'Reilly are usually pretty good.

I'm also frustrated by the lack of decent javascript documentation online. Although there are lots of excellent blogs that do go over concepts, there doesn't seem to be any site where everything is listed well and in one place. With the one notable exception of Quirksmode, most of the stuff online either seem to be left over from Netscape 3 days, or are snippets of half an idea on somebody's blog. So:

Javascript Reference. Something which comprehensively lists and explains the standard commands, but also goes a bit further. O'Reilly's JavaScript: The Definitive Guide sounds promising, but it was written in 2001, so I'm guessing it won't have much focus on the DOM or Ajax. There's a new edition coming out in June this year, but I want to have my CMS nearly finished by then. Perhaps I should be looking at getting the 2001 edition and using the internet or a newer Ajax book to support it - but any suggestions?

Ok, that'll do for now - there are more areas I want to work in, but those projects are still months away so they can wait. So please, if you have any knowledge of PHP, MySQL or Javascript, leave a comment! Even if it's just to say "I never done got a book on that, use google" :)

Thanks!

Comments

Leave a comment