When I was offered a copy to review PHP 5 E-commerce Development I wasn’t really sure what I would find inside its pages. Building a framework for e-commerce? Isn’t that such a complicated thing it would need thousands of pages to get everything? However, the author Michael Peacock manages to cover the core aspects of e-commerce websites and their requirements in just around 350 pages, including plenty of suggestions on how the framework could be expanded for specific cases. When the book arrived I was considering building my own e-commerce platform, but I wasn’t sure about the full requirements or the complexity of the task. PHP 5 E-commerce Development has taught me about both issues, even if I plan on developing my own platform using a PHP framework instead of building it from scratch.

The book is oriented to PHP developers familiar with MVC architectures and patterns, since both are used to build the framework. However, the book uses a very simplified version of MVC and briefly explains any pattern used, so it’s not necessary to be an expert with either. That said, this is not a book for beginners or to learn PHP. It is instead a very good book for PHP developers who want to learn more about e-commerce, since the requirements of each step of an e-commerce website are explained in detail. The book uses Object Oriented programming, so people who are not familiar with OO PHP may want to read about that first, though they shouldn’t have much trouble understanding the code itself.

The book’s goal is to build an extensive framework for online shops, that can be used for many e-commerce projects with different requirements, or built upon to fulfill very specific business needs. From a technical point of view, and after seeing the final product, it delivers. The language is easy to understand, and if anything it’s too detailed at times. Code samples (both for SQL statements and PHP scripts) compose probably half the book, with plenty of comments that make understanding them a breeze. If you want to check the writing style by yourself, you can check this sample for chapter 5, “Enhancing the User Experience” at the publisher’s website. Most of the chapters of this book focuses on a specific area of an e-commerce site, which for me means I can skip the areas I know about and focus on the chapters that I was more interested in, such as Marketing and Payment gateways. However, each chapter builds upon the previous so if you actually plan on coding the framework following the sources in the book you will need to read them sequentially.

Technically speaking, the book is correct and the framework built would work on a real life scenario. However, the author use of the MVC controller isn’t as strict as one could expect, with plenty of SQL sentences directly within the controllers. Personally, I’d have created models for each database object and use them inside the controllers. Also, on a real development I would avoid reinventing the wheel by using an existing PHP framework (Zend Framework, cakePHP) and a templating engine such as Smarty. However, that would have made the book too technology specific. I doubt the goal of the author was to provide his readers with a full fledged framework, specially considering the amount of ideas he gives on each chapter to expand it. It’s worth mentioning that the author suggestions always keep the end user in hand, even if a feature would mean decreasing the possibility of a sale slightly. I found that

Overall I think this book delivers and I would recommend it to any PHP programmer interested in learning more about e-commerce. It teaches you how to create a framework in PHP for e-commerce websites, guides you through the core requirements of such a site and gives you plenty of ideas about functionalities that could be implemented. I missed more examples using AJAX (mostly because nowadays it’s almost a must on web development) and there’s things I would do differently, but since it’s a generic PHP book that’s understandable. As a reference book for anybody who is thinking of building their own e-commerce system it’s a great resource. The way the author covers the full spectre of e-commerce, from the very basics to marketing, downloadable content and online APIs or Google Analytics helps the reader get a full idea of what e-commerce means, as opposed to just learning some code snippets. The book is available for purchase from from Packt Publishing.