Book Review: CouchDB and PHP Web Development

Finally the new Book “CouchDB and PHP Web Development” written by Tim Juravich is ready an in my hands. It was my first experience as technical reviewer. The author contacted me by email and the editor sent me book chapters to review. Basically, I gave my opinion, I test the code, and I hunt for bugs. It was a great experience.

As a general rule I don’t like the Beginner’s books. They normally fill various chapters with trivial things. Things that you can easily find within the project homepage, or you also can get thousands of articles in the Internet. Maybe the first 3 chapters are trivial things about NoSQL databases, how to set up a PHP environments, and we also can read about how to set up a github account. OK this book is not one exception, but it has something “different”. The author builds one application (a twitter clone) using PHP as backend languaje, CouchDB for the storage and Twitter’s Bootstrap for the frontend. It covers all the process from the beginning (setting up the environment) to the end (deploy the application to the cloud). The book is very interactive. It’s crowed by “Time for action” sections where the reader can build the application at the same time than he is reading. And to top it all the author also encourages the user to commit each change to one git repository.

My Conclusions
In my humble opinion, this is a good book, even with its trivial chapters (probably they are mandatory in this kind of books). If you read the book and you follow the all the “Time for action” sections you will have great picture about one real web application development process is and it also covers very well all CouchDB related things. Another good point for the author is the usage of newest front end technologies such as Twitter’s Bootstrap. Maybe I miss a bit the usage of TDD in the development process of the application but either way if fulfills its mission quite well.

Contact with me.
As I said before it was my first experience as a technical reviewer. It was a great experience for me. I really enjoyed a lot reading and commenting chapters. If you are writing a book and you need one reviewer, feel free to contact with me.