Hi Larry, nice to have a comment from the editor, and I want to say thanks for writing this book. however this discussion was initiated by a newbie asking what book he should use to learn php. ur book is important to the community of php freaks ! it saved my time to see where the path is going through ! without reading and surving on the web about the php6 branch. i do have ur book on 4 and 5 as well and the new book i could just use to overfly the php6 related parts and i was in the picture what COULD happen. thanks for ur work. however, for a newbie ? he would wonder why his production server tells him about parse errors of unknown construction, because its 5,x as I said earlier, "learning a family starting with a baby", however if you are familiar with the family, you should get to know the new baby. ralph_deffke@xxxxxxxx "Larry Ullman" <larry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:0C4DE4E7-8169-4477-8D70-25CCA96EBBB9@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > Thanks to the OP for the interest in the book and to everyone else for > their input. So here's what happened, from the writer/horse's mouth: > It was time to write an update to the book because the second edition > had been out for 3+ years or so, I think. It wasn't a money-making > effort (i.e., get people to buy another copy) but rather a touch-up to > make sure it's current enough. I had to make some decisions about what > versions to support; the previous edition supported both PHP 4 and 5. > PHP 6 was more than 50% complete at the time I started writing it and > I thought the Unicode support was a pretty big deal, this being an > ever-increasing global web...marketplace...blah...blah...blah. So I > wanted to start thinking along those lines and as I didn't know when > the fourth edition of the book would be written, I thought I'd get an > early jump on PHP 6. Yes, PHP 6 wasn't nearly finalized at the time > and no hosting companies were using it, but many hosting companies are > still using PHP 4 and PHP 6 *is* available for playing around with. So > that was my reasoning. In the end, only a bit more than one chapter > _requires_ PHP 6 and I do like looking a bit into the future of Web > development and PHP. Also, as I don't discuss OOP in this book (gasp!, > I leave that to my more advanced PHP book because a decent discussion > of OOP requires at least 150 pages and I'd need to cut out more > important topics to include it in this book), some of the features > being discussed in PHP 6 weren't problematic for the book one way or > the other (like namespaces, which ended up on PHP 5.3). Again, the > Unicode support was my main thinking. > > Two years later, had I known PHP 6 still wouldn't be out, I probably > wouldn't have touched it at all and I do feel a bit sheepish about > having a book out there on PHP 6 when PHP 6 isn't out there (for > production purposes), but these things do happen to books, > particularly with open-source projects that have no need to adhere to > deadlines. Still, I would like to think that at worst, 10% of the > material isn't usable today on production servers but still has a > philosophical benefit. To atone for my prematurity, I do try to > support the book as much as possible, I try to talk about all this > versioning stuff in publish ways (like on the Amazon page for the > book), and I don't think there's anything wrong with someone buying > the second edition if they're a bit concerned about the PHP 6 thing. > (In theory, I guess someone could, um, buy another writer's book, but > I prefer to plead ignorance of such outcomes.) We--the publisher and > I--also did consciously change the title of the book from "PHP and > MySQL for Dynamic..." to "PHP 6 and MySQL 5 for Dynamic..." to > indicate the distinctions being made. > > Sorry for the length, but I hope that helps. And thanks again. > Larry -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
