by Rasmus Lerdorf, O'Reilly Press

114 Pages

The PHP Pocket Reference begins with 29 useful pages of introductory and explanatory information on PHP such as declaring variables, using operators, and even creating a data-driven site. The remainder of this book's 114 pages list all of PHP's functions, providing a scaled-down version of the PHP documentation. Lerdorf include extra commentary before each group of functions, explaining concepts and including opinions on the functions listed.

Lerdorf includes valuable, instructional, and also very opinionated commentary on each group of PHP functions. Here's an example of his informative, helpful style:

Unlike SQL databases, once a dBase file is created, the database definition is fixed. There are no indexes that speed searching or otherwise organize your data. Because of these limitations, I don't recommend using dBase files as your production database. Choose a real SQL server, such as MySQL or Postgres, instead.

Unfortunately, an inherent problem in pocket references is that the entire volume has to fit in a pocket. This doesn't yield enough flexibility for a complete explanation of each PHP function (as in the PHP documentation), and the PHP Pocket Reference is limited to a single sentence-fragment explanation of each function. For a beginner, using this book to learn PHP could be very frustrating, because there is not even enough information given for one to know the essential details of passing data between functions. However, this book is a useful partner to the PHP documentation, including Lerdorf's comments on function groups. It also would be useful to seasoned PHP developers who just need a a quick reference to jog their memory.