First, the book is following what it says in the title, creating one e-Commerce site from the ground. From authentication to discount codes, everything is covered by the book. It touches also some APIs from payment gateways and Google. So who wants to have a ride in knowing how to build an eCommerce site with PHP 5 should read the book.

If you want just the positive feedback you should stop here.

Secondly, I don’t think the book has a well defined target, because author’s own framework is used all over the book and the explanations are not sufficient enough in my opinion. When there are so many frameworks on the market, it’s a very high chance that the users to use one of these frameworks (not the author’s one) to build the eShop. In this case most of the code is useless and you’ll remain just with the explanation of the logic behind. I also expected more specific info on payment processing, SEO, marketing, newsletters, admin alerts, and not necessary all the source code out there.

I reckon I didn’t read the description, excerpt or anything else about the book before starting to read it, so that’s why I was a bit dissapointed. The book’s description on Packt is correct: “This is a fast-paced tutorial focusing on creating a framework and using it to build an online store through an ongoing case study. Later chapters include examples to illustrate how easily the framework can be adapted for different situations. The framework and code are enhanced and built upon with each chapter, adding more and more functionality. “. So online store is just a case study, the book is focused on the framework.

However, the book is still very interesting for people that want to create their own in-house light framework and that don’t want to rely on a fat framework like CodeIgniter, phpCake, ZendFramework.

My conclusion: a nice reading, 4 stars out of 5, but if you don’t plan to use the framework presented in the book, then the source code is too much and hard to follow.

****~ (4.0/5)

openSource e-shop solutions: prestaShop, osCommerce.

Enjoy!

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In a few words: I’m impressed. It’s a must read for everybody who’s working with Oracle.

For those of you who never used SQL Developer, is a GUI like Toad or PL/SQL Developer. The main difference is that it’s free and made by Oracle. As a former user of PL/SQL Developer I have to say that Oracle SQL Developer reached its maturity, Oracle is investing a lot of efforts in developing this tool and this is why now SQL Developer is the most used tool for Oracle development, which is quite impressive considering it has just 2 or 3 years since it was launched.

I was using SQL Developer since it was on beta, still called Project Raptor, and I witnessed the way it grew day by day. From a very simple GUI the development team added:

• migration capabilities, making Oracle Migration Workbench deprecated
• schema copy, schema compare
• import/export capabilities
• SVN/CVS integration
• Data modelling
• excellent reporting capabilities

Now, coming back to the book: what’s better than having a book describing all the above written by the Product Manager of the tool? Sue did a fantastic job writing the book and now everybody have a reference (with a lot of examples and screenshots) for all the capabilities of SQL Developer.

I have to recon that there were quite a few things in the book that I have no idea they exists. This is mostly due to the fact that the product is on such a heavy development and the releases are launched very frequently.

After reading the book I am seriously thinking of buying the hard-copy of the book. Again, it’s something that everybody that deals with Oracle must have.

***** (5.0/5)

The prices at www.packtpub.com are:
- 38.69 EUR for the paper book (discounted 10%)
- 28.89 EUR for the eBook (discounted 15%)
- 44.68 EUR for the paper book + eBook (10% off paper book and 85% off eBook).

LATER UPDATE: I’ve got 15% off for people reading this review, you just need to use the promo code: OSQL15r

Enjoy!

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Considering this, stay tuned for the review just after the book will be launched as I will get it for free the day it is released.

Good luck!

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