Rating: 
Summary: A lot of hard work puts out a great book
Review: I have a friend is one of the main co-authors of this book, and let me tell you something else none of these reviews on here can tell you. Maybe to your surprise, authors do a lot of hard work and gain very little financially for their efforts. Firstly, they need to be excellent writers and must be on an expert on the material they are writing about itself. It's something that many people have a hard time focusing on one of these abilities, nevermind being able to do both. Mix in the sound project management and business advice where it applies, and you have a very rich and meaningful book that is more than just the code. My friend honestly put 2 weeks of solid 12 hours a day into each chapter he committed to this great book (which was 3) as well as another month and a half on his upcoming book as well. This man was determined to write the best book possible, explaining not just the hows, but the whys and everything else in between. After an exhausted effort, he delivered an amazingly useful and creative book - all of the reviews here are telling you the truth. A book that helped me understand not only XML or PHP a bit better, but helped me look at programming in a different way (as he commits himself to doing every day). By reading his work and seeing his endless commitment, he's a man that I'm proud to call my friend, and if you read his work too, you'd realize it's true. I hope you can support my friend in his great effort to bring you the quality chapters that he contributed. After learning that he simply broke even from writing the book in the first place, we - the fellow PHP programmers of the world - should show our support and encourage him so we can read more of his (as well the other authors) great work.
Rating:
Summary: Great for Personal, Professional and Academic Use!
Review: I've been an advocator of PHP for as long as I can remember. Although many of my colleagues have taken heart to Java, I still am a strong advocator of open-source technologies and PHP is one of the most interesting. I was looking for a good reference about PHP and XML since many of my students have also been interested in doing some web development work along side of their academic circullum. Having come to me, I suggested that they learned PHP since it was easy to use and you could start building complex applications with the platform right from the get go. After having my students learn Professional PHP4 Programming last semester, I also thought the students really needed to expand their knowledge, so I purchased several copies of Professional PHP4 XML to review so I could recommend a good book for PHP and XML. After reviewing the book for the past few days, I must say I was incredibly impressed. I have shown the book to a few of my avid students and convinced them they should get the book to advance their careers. Knowing PHP and XML professional will be a great boost for them early on in their academic and professional careers and I can think of no practical books better than Wrox's Professional PHP4 XML.
Rating:
Summary: Brillently Explained!
Review: I've purchased many PHP books over the years, learning PHP and programming from the ground up. I've just started dabbling with XML and I needed a resource that would get me going on the right footing. After a bit of searching, I decided to purchase Professional PHP4 XML and I must say, this book told me everything I wanted to know and more! As I read each chapter, I gained new insight into how XML and it's various technologies could make me a better programmer, designer and could help my client's projects. By taking the author's advice, I even gained new insight to programming some tools to make my job easier as a whole. These guys are truely brilliant and well experienced with PHP and XML - truely the leaders in their respective field. Given that I was new to XML, I started at the beginning and worked my way through the book. Outside of the chapter on SVG graphics, I found this book to engage in everything I was looking for and more. Every page is filled with insight and the DOM chapter even has notes for PHP 4.3.0! Talk about the Wrox crew planning in advance! It is obvious they put a great deal of work into making sure this book is to last. Since I'm a businessman as well as a programmer, I gained valuable insight from manner of the chapters as it appears these authors are pretty smart business people as well. By seeing all perspectives in a consistent, seemless and non-bloated manner, I can honestly say I feel like a true expert with XML technologies. The book provides many examples, clearly explained as well as well written. Given the book outlines OO examples with the functional ones, I could see both paradigms being demonstrated together. This approached has engage me and my fellow programmers to write more OO code. This book has pretty much revolutionized my way of programming and thinking. I'd recommend it to any PHP programmer, regardless of their experience. Fantastic book!
Rating:
Summary: This book works!
Review: If you want to learn how to use PHP and XML this is the book. I have several others but this is the one that shows you how to do it with real life code exammples.
Rating:
Summary: This book works!
Review: If you want to learn how to use PHP and XML this is the book. I have several others but this is the one that shows you how to do it with real life code exammples.
Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: PHP itself is usually very straightforward and easy to understand, but throw in the world of XML and things can become overwhelming very quickly. DOM, RSS, SAX, XPath, XSLT, XSL, XML-RPC - wow! Professional PHP4 XML will answer the questions "What is XML?" and "How do I use XML within PHP?" The book starts off with a nice introduction to PHP, including the use of classes and file functions. It isn't meant to teach you everything you need to know about PHP, but to be refresher course for information that will be used throughout the book. It was nice to see the promotion of the new superglobal arrays in this section of the book. Next, they jump into a chapter devoted to XML Fundamentals. This chapter explains the rules and syntax that a well-formed XML document must adhere to. DTDs and Schemas are discussed as methods to validate XML documents as well as define XML vocabularies. All in all, after reading this chapter you should have a good base to build upon for the rest of the book. The rest of the book is devoted to giving you detail on the different derivatives of XML and how and when do use them with PHP. Topics covered include: * SAX via PHP's Expat parser
* DOM
* XPath
* XSL via Sablotron
* Third party class for PHP such as XML File and phpXML
* RSS
* XML and databases
* SVG
* XML-RPC One of the things I love about this book is that for each of these XML derivatives, they provide a detailed list of advantages and disadvantages. This enables you to determine which of these technologies is best suited for the application you are designing. This book is an excellent resource for the beginner and advanced programmer alike. It is a mixture of a tutorial and reference book without comprising either. If you are serious about developing applications with PHP and XML, this book should be in your collection.
Rating:
Summary: Pros & Cons of A Helpful Reference for PHPers
Review: Pros & Cons...
- Comes with an index of XML technologies and how and where to apply them in PHP; this is quality advice for the PHP programmer who doesn't have the time to read all the W3 specs, but who does need be sure that they're using the right XML tool for the job. - SAX/DOM/XPATH/XSLT are all given an in-depth review from a PHP programmer's viewpoint. Found this helpful in compelling me to start using these technologies more, mainly because these examples are out-of-the-box useful. - I'm probably not alone in sometimes feeling overwhelmed by XML in terms of 'what, how and where' the database fits and what the datbase does. Most PHP programmers I know are attached at the hip to MySQL (& postgres), so when this book touches on where those databases overlap (intentionally or not?) it's a big help. It's by no means exhaustive but was sufficient to aid comprehension of the many APIs -- specifically how to use them in dealing with the output/input of XML from RDBMs. - Enjoyed and found interesting the chapter on SOAP use, along with some neat PHP samples, both useful and less so. One shows how to auto-generate SOAP requests using XSLT on a WSDL file. This chapter also tries to clear the thick fog about how everything will be put together in a world of web services (called SOA -- Service Orientated Architecture). - You won't need 3-4 different books, as XSLT/XPATH/SAX/XML/DOM
are listed with relevant PHP commands as appendixes. - The SVG chapter may someday prove useful but not today. I don't use it or expect to need it, honestly. - XML-RPC is heavily covered as you'd expect. The rather large case study attempted to show how everything *could* dovetail neatly. To analogize (though it's admittedly a bit of a stretch), this book is to PHP programmers what Michael Kay's reference book is to XSLT programmers, though achieved with completely different styles. If you're a confident/curious/cantankerous PHP programmer who needs to know quickly how and where to apply these technologies, I'd highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Pros & Cons of A Helpful Reference for PHPers
Review: Pros & Cons...
- Comes with an index of XML technologies and how and where to apply them in PHP; this is quality advice for the PHP programmer who doesn't have the time to read all the W3 specs, but who does need be sure that they're using the right XML tool for the job. - SAX/DOM/XPATH/XSLT are all given an in-depth review from a PHP programmer's viewpoint. Found this helpful in compelling me to start using these technologies more, mainly because these examples are out-of-the-box useful. - I'm probably not alone in sometimes feeling overwhelmed by XML in terms of 'what, how and where' the database fits and what the datbase does. Most PHP programmers I know are attached at the hip to MySQL (& postgres), so when this book touches on where those databases overlap (intentionally or not?) it's a big help. It's by no means exhaustive but was sufficient to aid comprehension of the many APIs -- specifically how to use them in dealing with the output/input of XML from RDBMs. - Enjoyed and found interesting the chapter on SOAP use, along with some neat PHP samples, both useful and less so. One shows how to auto-generate SOAP requests using XSLT on a WSDL file. This chapter also tries to clear the thick fog about how everything will be put together in a world of web services (called SOA -- Service Orientated Architecture). - You won't need 3-4 different books, as XSLT/XPATH/SAX/XML/DOM
are listed with relevant PHP commands as appendixes. - The SVG chapter may someday prove useful but not today. I don't use it or expect to need it, honestly. - XML-RPC is heavily covered as you'd expect. The rather large case study attempted to show how everything *could* dovetail neatly. To analogize (though it's admittedly a bit of a stretch), this book is to PHP programmers what Michael Kay's reference book is to XSLT programmers, though achieved with completely different styles. If you're a confident/curious/cantankerous PHP programmer who needs to know quickly how and where to apply these technologies, I'd highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Solid Coverage of Core XML Technologies
Review: The book features the most solid documentation on core XML technologies that i have ever read:
The SAX chapter is very interesting read because it goes beyond the installation of the SAX libraries and learning how to use the functions. Covering Expat, the chapter explains a great deal about how to use the less uncommon functions like xml_set_notation_decl_handler(), xml_set_external_entity_ref_handler() and the others effectively. Also of note, the diagrams and code examples were very clear and well done in this chapter. The chapter also looks at writing a properly modeled object-oriented SAX parser using eXtremePHP and covers common problems like removing whitespace, handling erroneous XML input and extending the white box infrastructure within eXtremePHP to create very powerful, yet elegant, XML Parsers.The DOM chapter covers the latest DOM extensions introduced in PHP 4.2.1 and even provides code examples and heads up information on what is to come in PHP 4.3.0. The chapter introduces what DOM is and even shows the reader a beautiful diagram illustrating how all the functions relate to an example. By simply looking at this, you can get a feel for how to use DOM almost immediately. The chapter continues to discuss how to enable DOM within your PHP installation on both Windows and UNIX and looks at the real-world advantages and disadvantages to using DOM over SAX. Next, the chapter explains the new DOM object model and looks at the underlying architecture before diving into any code examples. This information sets up the rest of the chapter, making it a lot easier for non-object oriented programs to visualize what methods belong to what objects and understanding the data relationships of the DOM tree. The chapter then presents a lot of code examples. First, it illustrates how many of the methods and functions of the DOM library work and then covers more complicated examples, illustrating how to parse, create and modify DOM documents with and without using HTML forms. The chapter closes with a pretty comprehensive look into the limitations of the DOM standard, explaining to the reader what the boundaries are, common problems with the API yet unfixed and provides future directions the library might take to correct many of the architectural, standards-based and object-oriented capabilities within the library. Kudos to everyone that made this book happen.
Rating: 
Summary: Frustrating...
Review: The problem with this book is that one example relies on examples from another chapter. Therefore, you have to pretty much read the entire 900 pages to get an example in the latter chapters to operate properly. An additional problem is the reference to downloading classes on websites that no longer exist. If you already know XML parsing, then this book is fine, but then I guess you wouldn't need the book.
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