Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management by Marc Delisle is the third edition of this book, and it follows the usual pattern of Packt Publishing books. The book has clearly defined objectives on the cover, and it follows a clear progression of its chosen subject from start to end. It is well presented, with a clear layout and clean page design that makes it easy to read.

Stuart gives a high-level overview of both phpMyAdmin ("it feels like phpMyAdmin as been around forever") and the book with an index of the topics covered.

Packt Publishing recently sent me a couple of books to review, so let's start with Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 by Hasin Hayder. According to the introduction, the book is intended for beginners to intermediate PHP5 programmers and the first chapter has a good introduction to what object oriented programming is and why you would want to use it.

He glosses over the first few chapters of the book (introductory stuff mostly) and points out three others specifically - Chapter 5 covering reflection and unit testing, Chapter 6 covering the SPL and Chapter 9 dealing with SimpleXML and DOM.

Packt Publishing recently sent me a couple of books to review. This post is about the second one I received, Learning PHP Data Objects by Dennis Popel. I was excited to receive this book as PDO underlies a lot of the Zend_Db_Adapter objects that I use in my day to day programming. It seemed like a good idea that I should know more about it.

He provides some good detail of what the book covers (chapter by chapter) as well as a summary including his recommendation for who should use the book and how they can best enjoy its contents.

Putting the aspects of Hayder's grasp of the English language aside, the book is rather good as an introduction to the various technologies that it covers.

He points out a few things of note - the beginner OOP chapters (only made for the newbies out there), the contents of the main OOP chapter and the good section on PHPUnit and unit testing. He also has a few suggestions of things that could make the book a bit better, including a personal suggestion on code formating and braces.

This book is a tutorial guide to Joomla! 1.5. It was written and published during the development of Joomla! 1.5. It is intended for Web developers, designers, Web masters, content editors and marketing professionals. It is suitable for anyone starting out with Joomla! 1.5, for people who upgrade to Joomla! 1.5, and for those who just want have a good printed manual at hand.

R.L. (the reviewer) goes through some of the chapters, detailing their content including some of the software mentioned in them (like Fireboard and DOCman). He recommends the book to anyone looking for a good in-hand Joomla! resource but notes that a chapter on security would have been a nice addition.

In short, my review is this: overall, the book detailed everything I can think of (and more) about phpMyAdmin - I learned about some features in phpMyAdmin that I was not already aware of. I would ask for less screenshots, more how-tos and less 3rd-person speech for the next revision, but if there are any questions I have about phpMyAdmin, the answer is in this book.

The review gets into more detail about the book - its structure, the wealth of content in it (including some unknown features) and a few things that could have been better. Kae mentions a few places where the author "forgets that the reader does not know the subject" and gets a bit too technical too fast. The screenshots, while good in moderation, overpowered parts of the chapters and made them harder to follow.

"Object Oriented Programming with PHP5" is a book that helps understanding many of the core OOP features within PHP, whilst looking at the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern and unit testing.

Ryan comments of a few issues he found with the book include the not-quite-an-introduction-level first chapter and the "More OOP" section that read like a copy of the php.net manual. Overall, though, his opinion is that it's a good book and provides a good overview of database functionality and the MVC design pattern.

So today you get a double bonus. You get to check out Pro PHP, Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and more by Kevin McArthur. You also get a great tutorial on SPL!

The sample chapter looks (obviously) at the SPL, the Standard PHP Library - functions included with PHP5 releases to accomplish some pretty cool things.

Planning to write a few extensions for site's I host I was looking for a book that could at least in part be a replacement for this documentation. As I went through the site of Pact publishing My eye fell on this particular book because of the example chapter they show. And indeed now I have the book I'm in no way disappointed.

He mentions the target audience of the book (and how well it hits it), the approach the book takes to the topics it covers and specific looks at several of the chapter topics like web services, error handling, security and plug-in structure.

I started reading "CodeIgniter for Rapid PHP Application Development" as a novice. This book is specially targeted to anybody like me: little or no prior experience of Object Oriented Programming or the MVC approach, with couple of years procedural PHP experience, and is after something that can really take you to the next level.

The reviewer (Ryan Partington) talks about what the CodeIgniter framework is, his struggle with the MVC concept, how the book is divided up and the benchmarking of framework applications.