Book Review + Giveaway Of PHP For Absolute Beginners (2 copies)
In today’s web development scenario, it is very necessary for a web developer to know how to code in PHP. PHP has become a major language in web development industry in last few years. From WordPress to FaceBook everything is coded in PHP language.
Recently we came to a book named PHP for Absolute Beginners which is a must read for beginners.
Today we are going to review the book and guess what? We have 2 free copies of book to give you free of cost. I wish that it would have been there when I was learning PHP. Anyways After buying the book, I read it and the book was something more than awesome.
About the Author
The book is written by Jason Lengstorf who is a self taught PHP developer. He is an experienced voice in PHP and web development. If you are a regular reader of some famous blogs like Smashing Magazine and CSS-Tricks then you might came to tutorials written by him. He is also co-author of the famous CSS-Tricks series “Creating a web app from scratch”. You can read his extensive interview by me here.
Inside the Book
Jason starts the book with how to install PHP on your computer and then leads you throughout the way to building up your own blog system with user comments. Rather than wasting the first chapter on the history of programming and PHP, how it came and other theoretical stuff, he tells the readers how to install xampp on your local computer for better development. I have read about 5-6 books on PHP and it was my habit to skip the first chapter of book, first time I read the starting chapter of book.

Why we liked the book?
The book is an example of a phrase, less theory, more coding. Jason teaches PHP with a lot of sample tutorials and examples. You will not read chapters and chapters of theory but you will learn best practices to do in the coding, and many pro tips which should be kept in mind when coding in PHP.
The Giveaway
We have got two copies of PHP for absolute beginners for the giveaway. We are very thankful to Jason Lengstorf and the publishers of book APRESS Publishers for supporting this giveaway.
How to enter in the giveaway?
Pretty simple, you have to leave a comment on the post and tell us what you want to see on 1stwebdesigner, or how we can make the website better. We will use random.org to pick the winners. The giveaway is open till 11:59pm GMT+5, February 18th 2010.
Grab the book right now
If you don’t like waiting for the result of giveaway, you can buy the book here through Amazon.com service. What we can assure you that this book is definitely worth your money.
Good Luck!
*Update by Dainis Graveris
Seeing all those amazing suggestions and comments changed my mind about randomized pick! We will choose winners with the most thoughtful, interesting and best answer! I just love to see how you drop down all the weak points of 1stwebdesigner site! I love you for that, and I am definitely thinking about new design, which will be very well researched and carefully put together to fix all problems, usability bugs we have here!
Give us more feedback! Completely inspired!
Update
The Giveaway is closed now.
Winners are Terri Lockerridge and Mark Anderson.
Thanks for your feedback and suggestions.
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zac
Posted 222 days ago 101Hi, I would love to see more ideas and examples of applications that can be created with Ruby on Rails. Also, anything to do with mobile programming.
Cheap SSL
Posted 337 days ago 100jQuery is one of at least a dozen JavaScript frameworks that have exploded onto the scene during the last few years, and for good reason. The Web 2.0 era has called upon JavaScript in a big way, turning to it as the driving force behind all the gliz and glamour that defines any Web 2.0 site. This huge increase in workload for JavaScript has called out for JavaScript frameworks that do the heavy lifting of common Web 2.0 tasks for us, from common visual effects such as fading, DOM traversal/ manipulation, to of course, Ajax interaction.
Mark Anderson
Posted 821 days ago 98Saad, What a surprise, I won something! Thanks very much for the e-book! I’ll be reading away over the next little while. I have been wanting this book for a while.
Thanks again!
Mark
Saad Bassi
Posted 821 days ago 99Congrats Mark. There are a lot of books coming soon. Stay tuned with us. Best of luck for the future.:)
Saad Bassi
Posted 823 days ago 96Thanks a lot Terri. Much appreciated. I hope that the book will help you in get started with PHP. Jason is also writing another book, Pro PHP and jQuery. We are sure that we will also have some copies of book to giveaway.
Salman Aslam
Posted 823 days ago 94I wish i could get my hand on this book =[
Saad Bassi
Posted 823 days ago 95You got late boy. What can we do:)
Cristhian
Posted 823 days ago 93Excellent book! Glad to participate :) I think it would be a great idea to focus on jquery/css tutorials for beginners in the future
.-= Cristhian´s last blog ..symbiotics: good morning twitters! starting a slow friday =-.
cssah
Posted 824 days ago 92Thanks, read more in-depth about javascript
.-= cssah´s last blog .. =-.
Rjdsign
Posted 824 days ago 91Nice one, at the moment i try to learn more about PHP, this book is a must have for me to learn more.
Thanks for this giveaway
.-= Rjdsign´s last blog ..Websites and webshops =-.
Voras
Posted 824 days ago 89I’d love to see more in-depth tutorials for beginners, preferably with clear coding examples.
And I’d love to get the book :).
.-= Voras´s last blog ..Infografika: dosniausi ir didžiausi =-.
lawrence77
Posted 824 days ago 88From the beginning itself i love 1stwebdesigner, u done a good job, keep up the good job,…
And random.org, pick my number :P
i want that book :(
Claude Sammut
Posted 824 days ago 87I would say more about CSS3 & jQuery