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Free online PHP-book: "Practical PHP Programming"!

Posted: Thu Oct 07, 2004 4:10 am
by patrikG

Posted: Thu Oct 07, 2004 4:20 am
by twigletmac
Just had a brief look through and it looks well written and clear, ta for that I know some people who will find it pretty useful :)

Mac

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Posted: Thu Oct 07, 2004 5:03 am
by Calimero
Just a suggestion, for 56k users - should we ZIP the site and place it for download ?!?!?

Is this fair to the site owner :?:

Posted: Thu Oct 07, 2004 5:04 am
by malcolmboston
honestly, when i visited the site i couldnt believe they didnt do this.

yes please!

(and yes, the site owner should of already thought of this)

Posted: Thu Oct 07, 2004 5:07 am
by twigletmac
He doesn't like site downloaders:
hudzilla.org wrote:Please do not use site downloaders to copy the book locally; it would hammer my web server, and is very selfish.
Maybe if you ask him nicely he can provide the information in more formats?

Mac

Posted: Thu Oct 07, 2004 5:08 am
by patrikG
malcolmboston wrote:honestly, when i visited the site i couldnt believe they didnt do this.

yes please!

(and yes, the site owner should of already thought of this)
No. Read the copyright notice on that. Paul has put a lot of work into writing this book (and what I've looked at is very well explained, well written, clearly structured), it's very generous of him to offer this online for free(!). Consequently it's more than fair if he says:
Paul Hudson wrote:You may: print the content out, save it to a local drive for offline reading, or link to any chapter of this book from your own site. I'd rather you didn't use a site download tool such as wget, partially because I hope to be able to update the content here as errors are spotted or I come up with new ideas, and also because it's a huge waste of my bandwidth.

You may not: distribute copies of the content (an exception to this is the source code) either on your own web site or on other media (digital or otherwise), sell access to the content, or otherwise copy the media.

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Posted: Thu Oct 07, 2004 5:12 am
by Calimero
Thats why I ask.

This was only suggestion for practicall use for those with 56 k - those with cable or satelite internet can just hop and get refference, but its much harder to do it from 56k.


Ok, nothing will be posted - if I don't get the owners licence or consent.


Will reply of that.

Posted: Fri Oct 08, 2004 10:36 am
by malcolmboston
patrikG wrote: No. Read the copyright notice on that. Paul has put a lot of work into writing this book (and what I've looked at is very well explained, well written, clearly structured), it's very generous of him to offer this online for free(!). Consequently it's more than fair if he says:
Well, he could'nt exactly charge for it as the php manual is free and better and alot of the content is just copied and slightly altered from the original

Posted: Fri Oct 08, 2004 10:37 am
by patrikG
malcolmboston wrote:
patrikG wrote: No. Read the copyright notice on that. Paul has put a lot of work into writing this book (and what I've looked at is very well explained, well written, clearly structured), it's very generous of him to offer this online for free(!). Consequently it's more than fair if he says:
Well, he could'nt exactly charge for it as the php manual is free and better and alot of the content is just copied and slightly altered from the original
Really? Wasn't aware of that. Could you give an example?

Posted: Fri Oct 08, 2004 10:44 am
by malcolmboston
non-php manual wrote: The original release of PHP was designed and created by Rasmus Lerdorf back in the middle of the 90s as a way of making various common web tasks easier and less repetitive. Back then, the main goal was to have the minimum amount of logic as was possible in order to achieve results, and this led to PHP being HTML-centric - that is, PHP code was embedded inside HTML.

The first popular version of PHP was called PHP/FI 2.0, for Personal Home Page / Form Interpreter, and, despite its parsing inconsistencies, managed to attract a fair few converts, including myself. The main issue with this version was that the PHP/FI parser was largely hand-written, and so users often encountered scripting errors that were not technically errors - they were just the PHP/FI parser screwing up. Furthermore, the parser was absolutely tied to the Apache web server, and was hardly renowned for its speed.
php-manual wrote: PHP succeeds an older product, named PHP/FI. PHP/FI was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, initially as a simple set of Perl scripts for tracking accesses to his online resume. He named this set of scripts 'Personal Home Page Tools'. As more functionality was required, Rasmus wrote a much larger C implementation, which was able to communicate with databases, and enabled users to develop simple dynamic Web applications. Rasmus chose to release the source code for PHP/FI for everybody to see, so that anybody can use it, as well as fix bugs in it and improve the code.
its not word for word, but as you read through the manual you start spotting alot of similarities (especially the install stats)

kudos is still given to the author though as he has definitely spent a long time doing it, i just cannot find a reason for justification of payment

Posted: Fri Oct 08, 2004 11:01 am
by patrikG
Obviously, as both paragraphs are dealing with the history of PHP they are using similar or the same terminology. Any bit of text written about PHP and its history which doesn't mention Rasmus Lersdorf would be serverely lacking and badly researched.

When I read your post above, I understood that Paul Hudson had more or less copied the PHP-manual (i.e. plagiarism) - which is quite a serious accusation. If you have more concrete examples than the one you quoted, please post it.

Although I don't know Paul personally (I haven't even had contact with him whatsoever)), I wouldn't think that someone who write for Linux Format (http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/) would be silly enough to copy large parts of the PHP manual.

As a side-note, here's a comment by Paul regarding the book:
Harry Fuecks's Blog at: http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=200734 wrote: "I asked Paul last month about adding a feedback mechanism, whether it was to make the entire thing some sort of wiki or just allow comments. I don't think he would mind if I shared part of his response:

> I see where you're coming from regarding > allowing comments beneath pages, but I > didn't want to introduce that sort of > thing just yet. > > The reason for this is because it's > essentially "first draft" right now: no > technical editor has been through it, and > neither has a production editor. As a > result, it's probably littered with many > hundreds of basic errors that I'd like to > get corrected before I open up general > comments."

Posted: Tue Oct 12, 2004 6:01 pm
by Hudzilla
'lo all,

Patrik: Thanks for posting the link to the book; I hope some people will follow it and maybe find something to help them learn.

The reason I'm posting is because of the mention of plagiarism - again, Patrik, you've done a great job of rebutting that on my behalf, so thanks ;) However, I can't say that I wrote this book in a virtual world cut off from reality: I had the PHP manual to hand, I had about six of my favourite PHP books on hand, I bothered people on IRC, I bothered PHP engine developers, I bothered PHP end-user coders to see what they thought and how they used the language, and did a heck of a lot of brainstorming to produce original content and cover original ground.

Having said that, I did not - and would not - plagiarise from others. In fact, it got to the point where I started stripping out references to other books because I was worried that maybe I'd get lawyers calling me up! I think the book suffered as a result; I would have loved to quote a hundred words or so from Fred Brooks' work, for example, but I think I ended up trimming that down to a brief mention and a recommendation to buy the book. (Or it might have been taken out entirely; I don't recall)

The text cited in a previous post isn't even remotely similar, despite it dealing with factual content. Citing statistics such as the number of machines upon which PHP runs is hardly plagiarism - particularly as the PHP team gets it from another source (Netcraft). How could we possibly cite different install stats unless one of us was wrong? :)

However, I admit that plagiarism - like libel - can sometimes be done without realising it, and if anyone spots something that looks mysteriously similar to the PHP manual or another book, I would much rather write it again than have people questioning the integrity of the text. At the end of the day the book is approximately 900 pages - there are at least 30 other PHP books out there, so surely *something* must have been covered in the same way by some of the books, by accident or otherwise.

Jumping tracks entirely... I've had several people get in touch asking whether the book could be placed in an easily downloadable format. This is something I'm considering, but right now there are some issues I need to work through regarding distribution rights. Until then I put some pretty lax distribution on it - print it out and save it all you like, just don't hand it out to others. Where I'd like to be in a few months - and this is the first time I've actually said this publically - is to say "hey, you can download it, redistribute it, mirror it, or do whatever you like with it."

Like I said, I'm in touch with various people regarding distribution right now, and it will take a little while to get that all resolved. However, I want as many people to benefit from this as possible and ideally the text itself will end up in the Creative Commons or similar. No promises, but that's my plan.

Take care, and thanks for the feedback!


Paul

PS: If you want to grab my attention with feedback, email is faster and easier ;)

Posted: Wed Oct 13, 2004 11:00 am
by Draco_03
This EXCELLENT !!

It is very clear and very (very) well written.
Kudos to you Paul.

And I Thx to PatrikG for posting the link.

Posted: Wed Oct 13, 2004 11:06 am
by phpScott
I thinks is great that Paul is willing to post the book.
I also thinks it is a great testimant to this community that some one who has taken the time to write this book and works for such a well recognized magazine takes the time to respond here.
Shows what a great community is being built.
Well not built, because it is here but continues.