Ask About PHP

When we first deployed Google Analytics to our websites, it was just a matter of putting in the javascript tagging according to GA’s setup guide. With that, we thought our job was done as “techies”. When the business folks and marketers approached us to get more detail out of GA, we happily put in on our list of to-dos, but at the bottom (of course).

That whole perception changed when I picked up this book “Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics”, written by Brian Clifton. It is a recommended read if you truly care about your organisation and its online presence.

(more…)

There are currently only two books published about Codeigniter available in the market, one is called CodeIgniter for Rapid PHP Application Development and the other is this one I’m reviewing.

Having being using Codeigniter for a few simple projects, and really consider myself a CI newbie, I scooped up this book when I saw in at my local library, hoping for more insights into this wonderful framework. Instead I was left disappointed.

(more…)

This book caught my eye recently because there was a chapter in it which talks about Search Engines. I’ve been looking at building a spider which can crawl a website and analyse SEO information for me, but wasn’t sure how to go about doing it.

Written by Timothy Boronczyk with help from Martin E. Psinas, this book didn’t really go much into depth on building a web spider/crawler, nor provide me with any major new information. But, it does give some very practical real world advice in building those commonly used application projects.

(more…)

It’s always important to have good resources when you are starting out to learn something new. Thankfully, learning PHP is much easier with books like Programming PHP (2nd edition).

Authored by Kevin Tatroe, Peter MacIntyre, and (none other than the father of the PHP language) Rasmus Lerdorf. I found this book to be an excellent, well-rounded companion for anyone doing anything with PHP.

But, is it good for the absolute beginner?

(more…)

When anyone starts learning something new these days, they tend to get overloaded with more information that they can handle. The same goes for trying to pick up PHP, the shear number of books available on this one topic is staggering. Luckily, there are some great books specially catered to beginners, and this book is one of them.

(more…)