I've been looking for a book to learn PHP when this thought came back. What the hell is with these titles? ``foo bible'', ``foo expert's guidebook'', ``foo: novice to expert'', ``foo: webmaster's cookbook'', ``foo for dummies'', god damn it! And these titles are representative of what's inside: frickin' content bloat (useless shitload of superfluous examples, retarded tips, repeating one idea for half of the book (``now assign 5 to $var; remember, to assign a variable, use =.'')), and learning at pace that ensures that even the most retarded cretin will get it all, hopefully. I have learned Scheme from HTDP, Haskell from YAHT, and C from K&R, and I am happy about these books, because there's no bullshit in them. Just some words, good example code, and exercises. And if you don't understand something, you look at the code and read the chapter again and think, and you are happy when you come up with the answer yourself. Maybe I've been reading too much Knuth, SICP, and the like; maybe my expectations are too high. But seriously, isn't there a non-webmaster-guide PHP learning book?
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Anonymous2009-07-04 20:56
"The C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchie
>>6
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
only for people with an attention span < 5 minutes long.
for normal people a good book is 10000 * better than looking at code samples.
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Anonymous2009-07-04 21:09
>>3
I've seen that, but it's more of a language reference than a tutorial. Still, I am planning to go through the function list.
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Anonymous2009-07-04 21:13
there aren't many good php books out there because they all seem to be written for webdesigners or non-programmers, which means programmers have to wade through chapters of newbie bullshit like "an array is a construct that holds multiple variables", and "sql is a database querying language, it is used for retrieving (or inserting) data from a database.".