Author/s : Mike Lohmann, Stefan Schadwinkel
Publisher : Developer.Press
Category :
Other
Review by : Jeanne Boyarsky
Rating : 2 horseshoes
The first book I read from this publisher (HTML5 Security) was really great. Two of my fellow moderators at CodeRanch reviewed other books from this publisher and gave poor reviews. I decided to review another book to see if the problem was the book or expectations. For a $3 PDF, you aren't expecting a full book. However, I am expecting accuracy, proofreading and saving me a good amount of time in research, a unique view or something.
My biggest problem is that this book needed an editor/proofreader. There were enough spelling and grammar errors to make the book hard to read. I didn't realize how important commas were to reading until they were missing in so many places. Even one of the author's bios had typos/spelling errors.
Let's suppose I can get past this issue. I couldn't, but let's suppose. The book walks you through a PHP project and how the authors did logging. The authors say they were motivated to write the book due to projects lacking in logging requirements. There are a few references to a project "log everything" making me think this was a project on the internet and this book is a form of project documentation/background. Couldn't find any source code online. I read the intro several times and still had trouble figuring out what the goal was.
A third of page 6 and all of page 7 was a code example. The code is commented, but I'm not a fan of a book dumping code on you. On the bright side, I'm not a PHP developer and found the code easy to read.
I did like the references to other projects like Monolog and Symfony2. The description of message flow types and exchanges was good. As was the intro to Casalog.
Unfortunately, I can't recommend you buy this. Even at $3, I don't think it is worth it. I suspect that books from DeveloperPress are heavily dependent on the author and I was lucky with HTML5 Security.
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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in
exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.
More info at Amazon.com