Hi friends!
I finished the second book from my PHP reading list, called “Einstieg in PHP 7 und MySQL 5.6”, Rheinwerk Computing. To make it short: Useless, no recommendation.
The main problem is that the book does not now if it wants to be an introduction for beginners to learn PHP or a reference manual to look up features. It tries to be both.
On one hand, it’s written as if the reader does not know the basics of programming, explaining what a variable is and what and if-statement is, including a really bad introduction to object-oriented programming that I already ranted about on medium.
On the other hand, it is a 600 pages small font book that dedicates only few sentences to each concept – so it is definitly not helping to learn programming from scratch, as the Head First books are. It seems to cover every feature the PHP programming language has one by one, and it’s not teaching the beginner what he needs from the perspective of a use case.
As I explained earlier, I’m not insterested to learn specific parts of syntax; that’s easy and I can google it on the fly. I want to learn about the ecosystem of modern real-world PHP applications, and in this regard the book didn’t help at all.
The only thing new that this book showed me compared to the previous one, was the syntax of classes in PHP 7. It’s basically exactly like Java, so I’m even less worried that I can work in PHP.
I have one last PHP book to read know, “PHP for absolute beginners”. I’m not positive to find there what I am looking for, but at least it’s a thin book. I think afterwards I’ll continue my research online, and the next time in the library I will look for the key words Laravendel and Composer instead of PHP itself.