Plug-in PHP – 100 power solutions, by Robin Nixon

This is a practical, nice guide to the huge and marvelous world of PHP plug-ins and snippets. There is a wide range of  solutions to problems you have and will be encountering if you are a programmer, create websites or are a webmaster, and this book introduces you to those solutions. The book has a good introduction that shows you in detail how to set up a PHP+MySQL+Apache server solution, using the best, most current and up to date technology with free programs available. Then, having done that, it gives you 100 power plug-ins that are ready to go and the can easily be included on your web pages.

PHP is a very versatile language, and there are an incredible number of people writing all sorts of programs – small and large – that they share with others. Learning the basics about how to build such useful little pieces of code, how to integrate them into you web site, and last but not least – how to modify them to suit your needs is very useful. It’s the stuff that enables you to create first-rate, efficient and dynamic websites. Few books that I know of do a  better job demonstrating these techniques than Plug-in PHP.

Each and every plug-in discussed in Plug-in PHP represents a complete, usable and working solution, and gives you immediate results. And all of the plug-ins presented in the book, along with some other useful snippets of code, are available on a companion website so that you can download, modify, experiment or do whatever you want with them (you are not allowed to sell them, of course). And there’s little or no learning curve, because each one is self-contained and thoroughly documented.

Plug-in PHP also contains a lot of good and useful tips about programming along with ideas and suggestions for further adapting the functions to your own needs. It even breaks down all the variables, arrays and functions used by each into at-a-glance tables, accompanied by a screen grab of every function in action. This makes the book extremely easy to use, even for complete beginners to PHP programming.

Here’s a quick listing of the plug-ins: Wrap Text; Caps Control; Friendly Text; Strip Whitespace; Word Selector; Count Tail; Text Truncate; Spell Check; Remove Accents; Shorten Text; Upload File; Resize Image; Make Thumbnail; Image Alter; Image Crop; Image Enlarge; Image Display; Image Convert; GIF Text; Image Watermark; Relative to Absolute URL; Get Links from URL; Check Links; Directory List; Query Highlight; Rolling Copyright; Embed YouTube Video; Create List; Hit Counter; Referer Log; Evaluate Expression; Validate Credit Card; Create Captcha; Check Captcha; Validate Text; Validate E-mail; Spam Catch; Send E-mail; BB Code; Pound Code; Check Links; Get Title from URL; Auto Back Links; Create Short URL; Use Short URL; Simple Web Proxy; Page Updated?; HTML to RSS; RSS to HTML; HTML to Mobile; Users Online; Post to Guestbook; Get Guestbook; Post to Chat; View Chat; Send Tweet; Send Direct Tweet; Get Tweets; Replace Smileys; Replace SMS Talk; Add User to DB; Get User from DB; Verify User in DB; Sanitize String; Create Session; Open Session; Close Session; Secure Session; Manage Cookie; Block User by Cookie; Create Google Chart; Curl Get Contents; Fetch Wiki Page; Fetch Flickr Stream; Get Yahoo! Answers; Search Yahoo!; Get Yahoo! Stock News; Get Yahoo! News; Search Google Books; Convert Currency; Ajax Request; Post Ajax Request; Get Ajax Request; Protect E-mail; Toggle Text; Status Message; Slide Show; Input Prompt; Words from Root; Predict Word; Get Country by IP; Bypass Captcha; Get Book from ISBN; Get Amazon Sales Rank; Pattern Match Word; Suggest Spelling; Google Translate; Corner GIF; Rounded Table; Display Bing Map.

Many of the plug-ins in the book can also easily be adapted slightly for other purposes, and all of them seem to me to be written in very efficient and compact code. There is an impressive range of stuff here – for processing text; image uploading and manipulation; content management; forms and user input; integrating your website with others; creating chat and messaging services; using MySQL; managing sessions and cookies; dealing with APIs; RSS; and XML; as well as integration with JavaScript and Ajax; and more.

Plug-in PHP is a very useful and well-written book that I do not hesitate to recommend for users that are just now starting to use PHP and even to people with intermediate skills. For very advanced users, on the other hand, there is little new in this book. It’s a great resource that I strongly recommend for its targeted groups of users!

Links to books by Robin Nixon at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN. See also Bokkilden.

Tagged as: 100 power solutions, book review, php programming, Plug-in PHP, Robin Nixon