Archive for January, 2008

I don’t normally read programming books, but I was given a copy of Learning PHP Data Objects as a gift a couple moths ago and thought I’d give it a spin. Though the book is a beginners guide to PDO, it requires the reader to have a working knowledge of PHP and Data Abstraction. I was particularly curious to read more about PDO, since I had always used the PEAR database abstraction classes (now MDB2), and wanted to see what, if anything, I was missing out on. I know what your thinking: PDO is compiled into PHP and the PEAR classes need to be parsed just like any other PHP script. This is true, but when you add in op-code level caching like APC, I doubt the speedup is THAT drastic (though I could be very wrong). As a beginners guide, I would have liked the book to compare the various database abstraction options available (i.e. PDO, MDB2, ADOdb, etc.) and provided a quick cost/benefit analysis. Overall the book is a good beginners guide and will teach you what you need to know to get started quickly.