Book Review: PHP Oracle Web Development
Yuli Vasiliev has put a lot of real-world PHP and Oracle experience into his book PHP Oracle Web Development. The book's reviewer, Arup Nanda, was, amongst other things, Oracle's DBA of the Year in 2003. The result is an excellent book that joins the PHP and Oracle worlds together.
Disclaimer: I work for Oracle, and I also co-wrote a free introductory Oracle PHP book, The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual. My book had its inception when no Oracle PHP books were available. It aims only to bridge the two complementary technologies. A large proportion of it speaks about installation, which was the major issue of the time, and the rest is small code snippets. Yuli's new book devotes his pages to the bigger picture covering, as the sub-title says, "Data processing, Security, Caching, XML, Web Services and AJAX". Installation in rightfully covered in just a brief appendix. There is little coverage of basic PHP syntax which, like installation, is also available in a myriad of external books and documents on the web.
Each chapter of PHP Oracle Web Development has a specific focus, following in turn the key words in the sub-title. Detailed, well thought out examples marry Oracle and PHP technology to solve architectural problems in a clear manner. Along the way smaller database and PHP features are covered in the context of the bigger problem. This makes it easy to read and understand where each plays a role. Yuli introduces techniques not seen before in a PHP Oracle book, such as the use of PL/SQL global application contexts for caching, and how to use Oracle's Change Notification feature.
The writing style is clear and the code examples are extensive, complete, and down loadable from Packt Publishing.
If you want to understand how to use Oracle features to architect and build efficient, real-world applications in PHP then this is the book to pick up.
