PHP isn't a magical solution to dynamic HTML, but it comes as close as anything is likely to. I've met Gogala at a few OUG meetings and he knows his stuff. If you aren't familiar with the topic read the book twice - first time leafing through to get an overview of the capabilities then a second drilling down. Time well spent. Throwing together a quick EIS dashboard using PHP is a great way to please the guys with the checkbooks. Like lighting a match in front of jungle natives, they'll bow down, cry "Great Juju!" and brag about it to other holders of unearned stock options at the golf club.

PHP isn't a magical solution to dynamic HTML, but it comes as close as anything is likely to. I've met Gogala at a few OUG meetings and he knows his stuff. If you aren't familiar with the topic read the book twice - first time leafing through to get an overview of the capabilities then a second drilling down. Time well spent. Throwing together a quick EIS dashboard using PHP is a great way to please the guys with the checkbooks. Like lighting a match in front of jungle natives, they'll bow down, cry "Great Juju!" and brag about it to other holders of unearned stock options at the golf club.

As the series editor for this book I was involved in Gogala's book, from initial inception to finished product, and I'm impressed. Oracle offers a wealth of different tools to create dynamic web pages (Apex (HTML-DB), Jdeveloper, Ruby on Rail on Oracle, etc.) and PHP is an excellent choice because it is powerful, mature and has well-tested Oracle interfaces.

It's very difficult to take a complex topic such as Oracle with PHP and condense it into an understandable and concise framework, but Gogala has met this challenge.

PHP is, by its very nature, a flexible and robust language, and I was happy to see that Gogala resisted the temptation to go into all of the advanced PHP features.

This is not an advanced PHP Oracle book. Rather, it is a get-started guide with lots of simple, easy to understand examples, and working Oracle PHP code snippets in the code download to allow beginners to get started fast. Mladen spent hundreds of hours refining his text and working with Steve Karam, his technical editor, and I hope that you will agree that this is a great way to get started with Oracle databases on the web.