LornaJane

I was recently contacted by Packt Publishing asking if I would review a copy of one of their new titles - PHP Team Development. I happily agreed and the book promptly arrived in the post (just in time for me to take it on holiday and read it by the pool!).

Overall I was quite disappointed by the book - although at least half of that was due to the poor written English contained there. Some sentences didn't even make sense, I'm not accustomed to reading anything other than clear English ("Vendor Locking" confused me for a while), and the language in this publication made reading the whole thing rather slow going. That said, for a brand new team of PHP developers with no previous experience of working in a team, there were some useful points in this book. Its clear that the author's experience lies in a large organisation building a single product, whereas I'd say the level of this book would apply well to web development shops with a handful of developers probably working on a series of different projects for clients.

There are some solid concepts introduced - few are explained in detail though and after a couple of chapters I think a less experienced developer would have had a list of terms to look up rather than new ideas to try! Still, there are good explanations of source control, MVC, templating, and OOP elsewhere on the web and in other books so it would be possible for someone to follow up on this. I was particularly alarmed at the concept where one team writes the model, another writes the view and yet another writes the controller to tie them all together. Perhaps in big enough development teams, with a lot of up-front specifications written, this can work. My on-the-ground experience though would lead me to group tasks together by feature rather than separate them by bits of implementation - I currently work in an organisation that uses agile projects though where features are the whole point of the exercise, so perhaps that influences me.

On the whole, a perfectly nice book for beginners but if you are already working in a team then you probably won't get a lot from this experience.