With the release of PHP 5 my first and foremost concern was with backwards compatibility with my old PHP 4 scripts. Will the new version run my old scripts and if so, how well? How much work is ahead of me to make sure my current scripts don’t suddenly stop working? This turned out to be my only nit pick with the book because Adam only mentions PHP 4 compatibility mode in passing. While this book is about upgrading to PHP 5, I felt this was worth more than a glancing mention. Though Adam didn’t spend any time on backwards compatibility, he did make sure to include instructions for installing PHP 5 along side PHP 4 so that you can get up to speed without losing all your old scripts. Aside from this minor sticking point “Upgrading to PHP 5” doesn’t disappoint.

“Upgrading to PHP 5” managed to answer all my major concerns and provide plenty of side by side comparisons of the code. PHP 5 was a pretty major upgrade to the language and Adam covers the bases very well. The chapter on Object Oriented Programming was excellent and helped me get my head around a subject I often struggle with, me being a very procedural programmer. PHP 5 also had some fairly major updates to its MySQL and XML support, both of which Adam goes into great detail about. The most exciting part for me was MySQL sub-selects and transactions and Adam covers those well here.

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