review

This is hardly a review of this book - more like a brief description of its contents to promote sales than help a potential purchaser decide on its usefulness.

I would have expected to see a description of its strengths and weaknesses. A lot of technical books are just rehashes of the on-line documentation. Does this book add substantial value?

I have to confess that I do not use Eclipse. It is an excellent tool but it consumes a lot of memory. The problem it is that it written in Java and need a lot libraries to run. The same goes for Zend Studio.

Since I am running Linux, I use Kate. It is much simpler for my needs.

As for the book utility versus online documentation, I am not sure, but I found the book very handy when I tried using PHPEclipse.

Besides being a printed book that you can carry anywhere, I found it useful in particular the chapters about setting up to work with PHP debugger extensions, which is usually an hell with most other IDEs that I tried.

I also liked the chapters that cover other interesting extensions for accessing repositories in CVS/Subversion and relational databases. Those extensions are unrelated to PHPEclipse but they are really helpful for everyday PHP development.