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Books
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Written by David Stockton
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Tuesday, June 14 2011 23:09 |
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| Author: |
Chris Snyder, Michael Southwell |
| Published: |
December 2010 |
| Publisher: |
Apress |
| Reviewer: |
Scott Hancock |
This was a pretty solid book on PHP web application security, and should be a part of any PHP developer's library. The author gives detailed descriptions of the most common ways in which your application can be attacked, and gives well thought out examples of how to guard against them. Here are some of the topics that you'll learn about in the book:
- SQL injection: This book gives a great overview of what SQL injection is, how to identify vulnerabilities, how to fix them, and how to test your application
- Cross-site scripting: This was a good one for me. Much of the documentation on XSS is pretty vague. The authors did a good job of providing several detailed examples of cross-site scripting attacks, and how to defend against them.
- Validating and Sanitizing input: The authors really stress the importance of validating and sanitizing any input that comes into your application. They give examples of how to create validation libraries. However, one of my main disappointments with the book was that they failed to discuss PHP's filter_var functionality.
- Captchas: What they are and how to implement them.
- Securing RESTful services: Restricting access, authenticating and authorizing requests, and enforcing quotas and rate limits.
- How to secure UNIX
- How to secure your database
- Encryption: The authors discuss keeping your passwords safe by hashing, and how to protect other sensitive data by symmetrical or asymmetrical encryption
- SSL and SSH: Securing network connections via SSL and SSH. How to generate certificates and keys.
- Securing shared hosting
- Keeping production and development environments separate
- Keeping software up to date
These are just some of the focus areas of this book. It provides even more interesting and valuable information. While this book won't make you a security expert, it will put you well on the path of proper security-minded PHP coding.
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Written by Trevor Henke
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Thursday, May 12 2011 00:00 |
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| Author: |
Matt Zandstra |
| Published: |
June 2010 |
| Publisher: |
Apress |
| Reviewer's Rating: |
4/5 |
PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice is the book I’ve been looking for. As a novice PHP developer it answered a lot of the questions I’ve had about the next steps to becoming an effective developer. Through the PHP object model, design patterns, and then putting it all together this is a must have book for any one wanting to take the next steps in their PHP knowledge.
The PHP object section is worth the cost of admission alone with this title. Not only covering the updates to PHP 5.3 but showing how to use them. From the coverage of the php “magic functions” to those of you struggling to put together a solid object model this is one of the most clearly written descriptions I’ve read. The examples of how to use abstract classes and inheritance effectively are especially helpful and setup a great transition to working with design patterns.
Design Patterns make up the meat of this book, and rightly so. I finally get the purpose of design patterns and how to use them with my work. Although, I’m by far not an expert on the topic, from a learning perspective, it is a spot on effective at teaching the principles of this sometimes complicated area.br
The Practice portion of this book is the only area I could see some better coverage on. While the topics and tools are covered expertly, it feels dated. From my experience with the PHP/Open source community, the tools covered are being eclipsed by distributed version control, and tighter IDE support. While I know folks are still using SVN, it would have been nice to see an updated chapter on using git or Mercurial.
PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice is an excellent book. If you are wanting to learn more about the very important topics covered, then this is probably the best starting point out there.
View more information about PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice at the publisher's site |
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Written by Nicholas Salvadore
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Tuesday, May 12 2009 20:40 |
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JavaScript: The Good Parts, is a concise, well written JavaScript guide intended for JavaScript developers with some degree of experience, and familiarity with the language. It does an excellent job of demonstrating to the developer how to get away from the object oriented class model that most popular languages of today utilize, and use the class free prototypal inheritance model which JavaScript was designed for. In addition to looking at broad design of JavaScript programming, Crockford points out common mistakes and problems that plague even experienced web developers. This ranges from more complex problems like JavaScript's lack of tail recursion optimization, to the preferred ways of declaring simple arrays and objects. Things any developer can benifit from.  Perhaps the most beneficial aspect of this book are the fully coded functions used to demonstrate shortfalls of JavaScript. These functions, such as is_array(), isNumber(), and trim(), not only provide the reader with an excellent solution, but gives a solid understanding of why the problem exists, and more importantly, why is must be corrected. Like all books, JavaScript: The Good Parts isn't without problems. While it provides an ample number of examples, some of the examples are overly condensed, and others seem incomplete. Overall JavaScript: The Good Parts is a valuable book which I would recommend to anybody who wishes to get a deeper understanding of JavaScript, or simply just wants to write more efficient and more soundly structured code.   View more information about JavaScript: The Good Parts at the publisher's site |
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Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5: Learn to leverage PHP5's OOP features to write manageable applications with ease |
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Written by Asa Martin
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Tuesday, January 27 2009 10:22 |
 | | Author: | Hasin Hayder |
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| Published: | December 2007 |
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| Publisher: | Packt Publishing |
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| Reviewer's Rating: | 3/5 |
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This book covers an introduction to object-oriented programming, design patterns for php, reflection, unit testing, SPL, databases, XML, and MVC design. It is targeted for beginner to intermediate users. Being new to PHP but not to programming I found the book to be a great introduction to the language. In fact, I learned quite a bit in this read which I am sure will prove valuable in my future development. The author gives many examples and does a decent job explaining things as he moves forward. Another plus is the book is an easy read and not very long. Unfortunately nothing is perfect and this book has some issues which are difficult to ignore. It is obvious that the author's first language was not English. He is able to convey his thoughts but the poor grammar should have been caught by the editor. I found this very distracting while reading. Another problem is while the author attempts to explain things in simple, plain language; he glosses over important points or is not clear enough in others. I realize this is knit picky but the end of his definition of the word "class" reads, "...sometimes in the book we will name an object as class, as they are both synonymous." Objects and classes are not the same thing and I feel that this distinction while not a major issue for new programmers should not be misrepresented. The last issue I will cover is in the design patterns section. He attempts to recreate the Singleton pattern which is one of the better known in development circles. While his code will work, it is not correct. He maintains a static instance variable properly but fails to protect the constructor by making it private. I am assuming from his example that the developer is supposed to call the constructor to obtain the singleton instance but by not protecting the constructor the php interpreter will create a new instance of the singleton object every time. The static instance variable will remain the same and the example will appear to work but in a real system this could become an issue as there are potentially multiple instance objects floating around on the heap waiting for garbage collection.
View more information about Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5: Learn to leverage PHP5's OOP Features To Write Manageable Applications With Ease at the publisher's site |
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Learning PHP Data Objects: A Beginner's Guide to PHP Data Objects, Database Connection Abstraction Library for PHP 5 |
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Written by Matt Skinner
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Monday, January 26 2009 20:27 |
 | | Author: | Dennis Popel |
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| Published: | August 2007 |
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| Publisher: | Packt Publishing |
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| Reviewer's Rating: | 4/5 |
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This book is targeted for PHP developers that are moving to PHP Data Objects (PDO) introduced in PHP 5. If you have limited experience with Object Oriented Programming (OOP), the book includes an appendix with almost 20 pages of OOP instruction with lot of PDO examples. If you don't need the OOP lesson, there are 154 pages dedicated to PDO.
The benefit of spending nearly $40 on 154 pages is to rapidly experience the benefits of PDO though lots of examples. If you're an advanced php developer, this book may not be for you. If you have limited experience with OOP and/or need a quick boost, this book has my recommendation.
View more information about Learning PHP Data Objects: A Beginner's Guide to PHP Data Objects, Database Connection Abstraction Library for PHP 5 at the publisher's website |
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