PHP Oracle Web Development by Yuli Vasiliev is the first book we've seen from Packt Publishing so we were interested to see how it shaped up. To quote the cover, the book describes data processing, security, caching, XML, Web Services and Ajax. Quite a lot for a mere 360 or so pages.

The book starts off with notes on both PHP and Oracle and describes how to obtain them both and how to get everything up and running using the PHP OCI8 extensions from Oracle. Whilst Oracle is a market leader in the big database arena, many developers will be surprised to learn that the full and unrestricted product is freely downloadable for development purposes - you only need to buy a licence for a production system. Even then, a free cut down version is available if you don't need the full bells and whistles.

So, with everything up and running, the book launches in to the subject at hand. We were immedietely impressed with the author's clear and easily read prose. Every subject is presented with just the right balance of detail with lots of additional notes and background information to help fill in any gaps. The author's real world experience shines through with sections on locking issues and coding for reusability. The section on object-orienation was particularly welcome.

Product	PHP Oracle Web Development
From	Packt Publishing
	Clear easy to follow prose, wide ranging coverage, very thorough
	No troubleshooting

The bulk of the book though is the coverage of the OCI8 extentions and here you can find out how to issue a wide variety of SQL statements including using stored procedures, making use of triggers and a good section on transaction handling that didn't just show how to use them but also had useful advice on structuring your code to make best use of them. We would have hoped for some notes on avoiding things like SQL Injection attacks but that apart, the security section had some interesting nuggets.

The section on object-orientation warrents close inspection if you want to really leverage the power of the tools available in this development environment. It didn't have much on the 'big picture' of how you'd structure applications this way but it does describe how it all works and how to extend existing objects as well as create your own.

Conclusion

We can safely say that if you need to get to grips with PHP in an Oracle environment, you'll find everything you'll need here to get up and running very quickly. The pace, content and structure of the book are all excellent with our only reserve being the assumption that everything works as it is supposed to with not much in the way of troubleshooting advice. That apart, this is a fine book.