Book Review: PHP Application Development with Netbeans

It's been a while since I last reviewed a book, so here comes a new one, about using Netbeans to build PHP websites.

Note: Free evaluation copy provided by the publisher.

Review

Title: Application Development with NetBeans - Begginer's guide
Author: M. A. Hossain Toru

Disclaimer: As the title clearly states "Begginer's guide" I'm judging it accordingly.

This book starts with the typical first chapter about step-by-step installation full of setup wizard screenshots, followed by a chapter about how the editor works. Here we can find from simple action descriptions, to more interesting topics like Netbeans support of name refacoring, going to definition of variables, code completion customization...

Chapter 3 focuses on a big example: Building a Facebook like status wall with PHP, Javascript, MySQL and Netbeans. Nothing incredible nor complex, but well explained and detailing only those steps related with Netbeans (instead of for example digging into how jQuery works).

Then we have chapters about hot to setup debugging, a tiny tiny intro on testing with PHPUnit, how to document with PHPDoc tags, a full chapter on how to use Git from inside Netbeans, and some patterns and practices of how to build a small API behind a website.

For being a begginer's book is not bad, teaches you quite a few productivity boosting IDE tips and sets you on the path for doing things the right way (refactoring, testing, source code management...). Also it comes full of diagrams and drawings to explain all non trivial topics, an extra effor put by the author that is quite welcome instead of pure text and code.

Of course an advanced user won't find anything of interest, but if you already know PHP but want a quick way of learning how Netbeans works, it's a good choice.