Building 50 Practical Applications
ISBN: 0764549669
Pages: 875
Publisher: Wiley
Topic: PHP
Rating: 
– (3 out of 5)
A lot of websites use the PHP programming language, but many programmers don’t know how easy it is to hack into PHP scripts. Secure PHP Development is a book concerned with educating its readers of how to build fast secure PHP applications.
Secure PHP Development begins with chapters covering how to avoid security risks and PHP best practices including writing good select statements and how to deal with missing data. There are then chapters instructing you how to create a central authentication and user management system which can be used with intranet applications. A few chapters concentrate on building PHP intranet applications as well as how to build PHP internet applications.
Out of the 50 applications contained within the book, there are online help systems, tell-a-friend programs, an email survey program and an e-campaign system which is a mass email newsletter type program. There are also many other applications including a hard disk monitoring utility, a geo location finder tool for IP and a CPU load monitoring system.
The final two chapters of the book cover speeding up PHP applications and securing PHP applications. There are such tips as benchmarking your code and how to avoid bad loops in PHP as well as being able to buffer your PHP application output so that once the first run of the PHP code is completed the cached version is displayed which will run a lot faster.
Secure PHP Development is a very large book at over 875 pages, and it covers some useful information on writing secure PHP applications, but most of the book is taken up by going through the 50 PHP applications.
One good aspect of this book is that it does not go through the basics of the PHP programming language, as most PHP books do. Someone would only really benefit from buying this book if they are interested in one of the 50 applications.
Secure PHP Development comes supplied with a CD containing the 50 practical applications, it also contains Secure PHP Development as an ebook and it contains Apache, PHP and MySQL programs.