I have been putting off reading this particular PHP book, mainly because I had been beefing up my main core skills/knowledge such as OO, XML, CSS, Javascript, and didn’t see a need to check out the “recipes” in this book.

This post will be like a first draft before I post this review on Amazon.

It’s very packed full of stuff that, instead of thinking: “i might need this particularly obscure thing later, but then again probably not”, you’ll probably consider getting a lot of use out of at least 75% of the “hack” recipes eventually.


They’re not really hacks by the way, in the negative sense of the word. (Maybe the Recipes book came out first and “Hacks” was the next best word for the title, who knows). But these hack/tips are based on fundamental technologies such as reading/writing XML, preventing double submission on ecommerce sites, making use of design patterns in PHP, great UI tips ( i immediately put one of them to use, which had a url to a popular dhtml library I didnt’ even know of).

A major portion of the hacks involve excellent user interface advice such as dhtml menus, generating images, etc..

Excellent real web application MySQL tips that include a basic login system, or a php recipe that you can use over and over to auto-generate sql CRUD (create/read/update/delete) php code. And the other way around. Auto-create mysql code from xml files that contain the schema for the tables.

Also recipes that involve basic knowledge in adding a paypal buy button, php unit testing, testing with simulated users.

I’d consider it a must-have for all php coders.

PHP HACKS

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