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Posted by Timothy Murphy on 08/28/05 15:04
Lateralus wrote:
> Jerry is on the right track. What you want in the manual doesn't teach
> you PHP, but rather teaches you how to perform a specific task with
> PHP.
Slightly OT,
but I've just been reading the manual,
and I would give it 7/10 ;
pretty good but could do better.
Some minor criticisms:
1. It is not explained clearly how one is meant
to run the php example programs.
If in fact it is assumed that one has write access to a web-server
then this should be stated on page 1.
It seems to me that very few php newbies _will_ in fact
have write access to an external server.
I would have thought that the method open to many if not most readers
would be to run apache on one machine on a home LAN,
and access this from another machine on the LAN.
Assuming that is the case, this should have been made clear.
2. It is not at all clear in the beginning
if one is meant to wrap the examples in html
(as is done with the first example hello.php).
Throughout, it would have been better to say
exactly what the reader is meant to do.
This would take very little time or space,
and would greatly improve the manual, IMHO.
3. It would have been better to have named all the programs,
as form.php or whatever, and said precisely
what one was meant to do with the file.
4, Some but not all of the examples
can be run by "php foo.php".
This should have been introduced and clarified.
5. I suspect when it comes to language reference,
it would have been better to differentiate between
those familiar with C (or Java) -
probably a large majority - and those not.
For the former, it would be better
to list the differences between php and C syntaxes.
6. I don't think it is appropriate in a PHP manual
to try to explain how to install apache.
There are plenty of documents which do that.
In any case, I imagine most readers are running Linux
and either have apache already installed
or can install from rpm, or similar.
--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
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