Essential PHP Tools: Modules, Extensions and Accelerators
By David Sklar
Published 2004 by Apress

I've never been a fan of the phrase "don't reinvent the wheel," but it turns out I am a big fan of David Sklar's book, Essential PHP Tools: Modules, Extensions and Accelerators. I knew the first time I held it that I was holding something exciting. Sklar has written an excellent book introducing the intermediate PHP programmer to some of the many PHP add-ons and classes that can help avoid wheel reinvention and make programming easier.

Published by Apress, the book consists of 13 chapters sectioned into 5 parts. The first part discusses PEAR::DB and ADODB, two abstraction layers which can be used to interface with various databases. The second part details HTML_QuickForm and Smarty, two packages aimed at assisting with HTML generation.

Part three explores parsing and using XML in PHP and covers the XML-RPC and SOAP modules and SimpleXML. Part Four focuses on such network tasks as sending email and authenticating users by covering Mail, Mail_mime, Auth and Auth_HTTP.

Finally, part five provides an overview of the internal workings of PHP and how it tokenizes and processes a script, and then reviews debugging, caching and optimizing your PHP code.

While not all the modules covered were part of the PHP Extensions and Applications Repository, many were and so Sklar also covered the installation and use of the PEAR Package Manager.

The book rightfully bills itself as an essential guide to some of the best free add-ons to PHP. It does a great service to the PHP community by documenting many useful modules that have only been lightly documented.

Sklar's writing is clear, concise and accurate. I enjoyed reading through the sections that covered extensions I'm already familiar with and learning about new ones I wasn't. I stayed up clear past my "bedtime" several nights while implementing the covered modules in my program, unable to pull myself away.

It's also nice that this book is written for both PHP 4 and 5; with a forward mindset, one doesn't have to worry about the content going stale in 6 months.

The book is a definite recommendation for intermediate to advanced programmers both as a text and as a reference. It certainly has earned itself a spot on my frequently-used bookshelf!

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