On the market, there are a great number of PHP books, making most beginners feel difficult to find the best ones. Therefore, we have worked out a collection of the best PHP books, including 5 of the most famous books, each of which is widely read by numerous people and followed by more and more readers each day.

In the industry, there are many widely-used PHP image gallery scripts and quantities of other kinds of PHP-based applications, such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, OpenCart, PrestaShop, and much more. Therefore, we made this collection to help you know more about this open-source scripting language and develop you own application that is as user-friendly as the popular PHP scripts and applications we mentioned before.

Before developing this collection, we have reviewed more than 100 PHP books from price and content. In addition, we have read all the customer reviews of these books. As a result, we found the following books are the best, each of which enjoys a high customer satisfaction rate, so we selected them as the best. Now, read the following parts to learn the information of each selected books and choose the one suiting your needs best.

Programming PHP

The third edition of this book includes everything you need to know when you plan to create effective applications with the latest featured included in PHP 5.x. Including 17 parts, this book tells you what PHP does, the brief story of this scripting language, installing PHP, and a walk through PHP in the 1st part. Besides, in the 8th part, this book teaches you how to use PHP to access a database, retrieve date and insert more complex data.

In the 13th part, the author mainly talks about application techniques, such as handling output, templating systems, error handling and performance tuning. Additionally, in the 14th part, author mainly discusses this scripting language on disparate platforms, including writing portable code for Unix and Windows and interfacing with COM.

Price: $28.51

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PHP and MySQL Web Development

This book gives the extremely helpful guides to creating database-drive web applications with PHP and shows how to use useful tools together to build effective and interactive web applications. What’s more, in this book, the author introduces PHP clearly and teaches you how to use this scripting language to interact with the database and the server. Besides, it includes many examples showing common tasks, such as constructing a shopping cart, authenticating users, sending and managing emails, etc.

In the first part, the author tells storing and retrieving data, using arrays, reusing code and writing functions, error and exception handling, string manipulation and regular expressions. Moreover, the 3rd part of this book mainly discusses eCommerce and security. In addition, you are able to learn the advanced PHP techniques and skills of building practical PHP projects respectively in the 4th and 5th part.

Price: $34.05

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PHP for the Web

By reading this book, beginners are able to learn more about PHP and intermediate users are capable of finding what they need. In addition, this book includes many step-by-step introductions and many screenshots to help beginners and intermediate users know more about this famous scripting language. Besides, the author also discusses the usage and awareness of HTML5 with PHP in this book.

In the 1st chapter of this book, the author wrote the basic information of this popular open-source scripting language and the basic debugging steps. In the 8th chapter, you are able to learn how to create applications, including creating templates, using constants, using external files, handling HTML forms with PHP and making forms sticky. In addition, you are able to learn how to create functions in the 10th chapter.

Price: $28.31

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PHP Cookbook

This book is the best choice for people who want to know a certain PHP programming technique and learn tips on accomplishing a particular task. The 3rd edition comes with 350+ code-rich recipes revised for PHP 5.4 and 5.5, offering updated solutions for generating dynamic web content, from using basic data types to querying databases. In this book, you are able to find recipes to help you with key concepts, web programming and much more.

To be specific, in the 8th part of this book, the author mainly talks about the web fundamentals, including setting cookies, reading cookie values, deleting cookies, building a query string, and much more. Moreover, in the 10th part, the author teaches you how to use DBM databases and a SQLite database, connect to a SQL database, query a SQL database, escape quotes, etc. Besides, the 21st part of this book mainly talks about software engineering.

Price: $43.88

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PHP Objects, Patterns and Practice

This book is a great fit for any people with basics of this open-source scripting language and those people who feel difficult to use their interfaces in their projects. By reading this book, you not only are able to know the basics of PHP but also can learn the enterprise development practice used by professional programmers. Besides, it is also a good choice for people who long to know tools like testing, version control, practice and continuous integration.

Including 5 parts and 21 chapters, this book comes with lots of useful guides for programming. In the 1st part, the author brings a comprehensive introduction of this scripting language. In the 2nd part, the author mainly talks about the objects, such as PHP & objects, object basics, advanced features, object tools, and objects & design. The 3rd part and the 4th part of this book respectively discuss the patterns and practice. In the last part, the author gives a comprehensive conclusion of objects, patterns and practice.

Price: $31.82

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