Tasty Time Savers
Written: May 19 '05 (Updated May 19 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Clear, concise, well-organized, with practical solutions to common coding problems.
Cons: Fairly expensive, and most of these solutions are already available online.
The Bottom Line: A useful resource for those who code regularly, especially if they can get their company to pick up the tab. But, for many people, it's probably not a vital resource.
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| sulkn's Full Review: |
It doesn't take long for most programmers to realize that the vast majority of coding consists of solving the same sorts of problems over and over, with slight variations. There seem to be very few projects out there that are entirely original. Therefore, an intelligent coder soon builds a library of functions, objects, and techniques that he or she can refer back to at frequent intervals.
Need to validate a form field to see if it's a valid email address format? Why reinvent the wheel -- just grab that function you used last time and drop it into your new project. In an ideal project there's often little need for much new coding; most of the work simply involves the customization and integration of code you've already written.
The much loved O'Reilly book series gives PHP coders a head start by providing an excellent library of commonly used functions and techniques. The PHP Cookbook consists of 567 pages of useful PHP code snippets. Many of your typical time-wasting tasks are covered: string, number, and date manipulations; arrays; cookies and session management; database reading and writing; file handling; and encryption. In my experience, these are indeed the types of challenges that pop up frequently when coding for the web.
This book is not an introduction to PHP, or even an advanced coding tutorial. The target audience is a coder who is already familiar with the basics of the language, and web development in general, but wants to save time. The book is well-organized, and you can usually find the snippet you need -- or something very similar -- very quickly. The code is explained, piece by piece, in clear and succinct language. Web jargon (which can become an annoyance even for an advanced computer user at times) is kept to a minimum. To cut down on typing time (and potential typos) all the code included in the book is also downloadable from the accompanying web site.
And therein lies the only real negative about this book: it’s pretty expensive at over $60 Canadian, and, let’s face it: all this information is available online. Even with this handy book on the shelf only a few feet away from me, I still often forget about it, and instead just pop over to Google, type in a few keywords, and choose from a handful of nice, pre-coded solutions that other coders before me have implemented. Of course, the coding techniques you might scrape from random newsgroups on the web are probably not as well-formed or reliable as those in a book; but for small problems that isn’t usually an issue.
Bottom line: if you work for a company, or freelance enough that you can write this book off as a tax break, then it may be worth picking up. If you only code occasionally, however, you might be better off saving your cash and sticking with Google.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
sulkn
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Member: Gary
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Reviews written: 27
Trusted by: 29 members
About Me:
A 30-something web developer in Toronto, Canada.
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