Product DescriptionPHP is an insanely popular, easy-to-learn language that you can use to create dynamic webpages in double-quick time. Whether the PHP webpage you create is for business or pleasure, you obviously want your webpage to be as attractive as possible (though not at the expense of your website's performance!). In the PHP Graphics Handbook, we show you cunning graphical techniques that will make your website stand out from the crowd.
Here's an example. Say you wanted to display data from an online poll - the results of which were changing all the time - in a professional-looking graph. You could regenerate an image of the graph periodically, by using a spreadsheet application and updating the data values it contains every so often by hand. But who really wants to waste time like that? Wouldn't it be much better to store the poll data in a database, and then get PHP to link to that, pull out the data, and use a graphics library to display the poll directly in the browser? We show you how.
Here's another. Many websites display thumbnails of images that you click on to display the full size image, or perhaps as a link to another page. Of course, we don't want to have to create thumbnails of all these images ourselves, and then store the thumbnails and full size images too. A much more effective way to handle thumbnails is to generate them 'on the fly' from the original image, which we can do several ways using PHP. But which approach would produce the best quality thumbnails? And which would create them the fastest? We tell you.
Both of these examples involve generating images or charts dynamically (on the fly). This is the main benefit of using PHP to generate graphics, so it's the thread that links all of the topics we discuss in the book. With the knowledge you pick up from the book, you'll be able to enhance the appearance and functionality of your website dramatically.
The book teaches you how to apply all of the following techniques on the fly using your PHP code:
- Creating new image files in various formats and drawing on blank images - Merging, blurring, cropping, copying and cutting-up images - The most effective ways to generate thumbnails and store images - Manipulating color, grayscaling and duotone, adjusting brightness - Adding transparency, soft and hard shadows, and watermarks - How to add text to images: handling fonts and text layout - How to create professional-looking charts and graphs
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - Employers like me now
This book covers image manipulation using PHP pretty well. It will take a method such as resizing, explain the functions required, give you some example code how to scale, and the explain the code. It covers just about everything that you would ever want to do, including using ImageMagick (which many servers do have!).
The book does, however, have some dead spots. Twards the end it starts talking about different kinds of graphs. It will give you huge chunks of code and not explain ... Read More
Rating: - Not bad for the first book on PHP Graphics
I am disturbed by the other reviews as the credentials of the reviewers are not revealed. As a graduate student and researcher I like to explore the facts before forming my opinion and judgement. I am new to PHP programming and have learned a great deal about it. Am I an expert? No, but I am a sensible reader.
For starters, one must understand that PHP is a programming language and that there is no application that does PHP assembly without having to write the code. Front Page does this for ... Read More
Rating: - Disappointment and Frustration
As indicated by the title, this book was disappointing, and frustrating. For starters, like the previous reviewer stated, it contained several typos and other errors. It also contained extensive sections on only marginally related information, third-party, non-PHP software, and creating MySQL databases, issues which belong in appendices.
This information actually ends up occupying a large portion of the book. This however, was not the real source of my frustrations and disappointment. The ... Read More
Rating: - Loads of errors, and the source code download fails.
Learning a subject by deciphering grammatical mistakes and typographical errors, and debugging code is hard enough. Going to the publisher's website and discovering that there are no submissions for errata, and that the source code download is broken spills what motivation may be left to read the rest of the book right out of the sails.
After scanning the book's index and table of contents, I had high hopes for the knowledge that I'd gain by spending the 40 bucks or so for the book, but am now ... Read More
- Employers like me now
- Not bad for the first book on PHP Graphics
- Disappointment and Frustration
