PHP 5 e-commerce Development [Kindle Edition]

The book promises the following:

*Build a flexible e-commerce framework using PHP, which can be extended and modified for the purposes of any e-commerce site
*Enable customer retention and more business by creating rich user experiences
*Develop a suitable structure for your framework and create a registry to store core objects
*Promote your e-commerce site using techniques with APIs such as Google Products or Amazon web services, SEO, marketing, and customer satisfaction
All of this is true, but...

1.The book does not make use of an existing framework. There are tons of them out there, so why re-invent the wheel to do specific tasks if someone already did that and tested and fine-tuned it.
2.The book does make use of a custom, application-specific framework. However, the design of the framework is not clean enough in my opinion. It is based on MVC, yet it does have some portions of code that are sitting in the wrong place... SQL code in the controllers, no real abstraction of the data layer, ...
3.Inexperienced PHP developers will not learn the best-practices from this book.
Not all is negative of course! The writing style is good and provides an easy read. Next to that, all concepts and pitfalls that go with building an online commerce site are well explained. Still, my advise on this book would not be "buy it".

I was asked to review this book on behalf of the publisher, Packt Publishing and received this book free of charge. All that follows is my honest opinion or perspective.

In a time where E-commerce seems to be the buzz on the inter-webs, new online stores popping up every day, where do you begin? There are tons of e-commerce frameworks out there, how do you begin to fathom the core logic of it all? If I choose a framework, how easy is it to learn, to tailor to my needs? Enter "PHP 5 e-commerce development", a book written by Michael Peacock. The goal of this book is to give you perspective on creating your own framework that you know and understand. To give our framework some forethought into making it extensible, containing features essential to any e-commerce framework.

This book will get you on your way to understanding what makes e-commerce tick. Though the language of choice in this book is PHP, any web developer would find the information contained easy to understand, regardless of what language you prefer. To those that are not familiar with object oriented programming, you may find the code a little hard to follow, but do not let that scare you off, the concepts are universal.

The author, Michael Peacock, is very generous with sharing his thoughts and knowledge of e-commerce. Source code is either documented with his thoughts or explained in context as the chapters parallel our development cycle. Nearly every concept or feature I have seen in online stores is covered, he also shares thoughts on what else we could add to further enhance our code. Be forewarned, chapter thirteen is meant as a primer as administration is a whole book on it's own, he does proved some SQL code to assist us.

Though I did not agree on some of his choices with regards to coding and database design, the framework he presents is solid and robust. Again the goal of this book is to assist you in creating your own framework, it accomplishes just that. I wish the author was able to cram a bit more into the already packed 356 page book. When I do development my own framework, this will be the book I will look back as a quick reference. Do not take my word for it, the publisher has a sample chapter available on their site so if anything give it a look over.

To answer Maartens question:-

You would use your own e-commerce software rather than a ready-made one for uniqueness, specific requirements, a client requests it and as the author Michael Peacock points out, familiarity. That is once you create a framework that you have intimate knowledge of it is much easier to extend, improve and customize it.

Amazingly creating a PHP e-commerce application, especially with such well written step by step instructions, is nowhere near as time consuming or technically challenging as you might have thought. And remember when your done the advantages mentioned. You would just have to add a few unique features and a template and each client has their very own, custom made for them e-commerce store.

That has got to be worth allot in todays off-the-shelf dominated market.