CouchDB and PHP Web Development Beginner's Guide:

I found this book to be a very useful tool. For anyone considering using CouchDB and PHP this is the place to start.

When I first picked up this book, I was expecting a boring, text-book approach to code examples for PHP talking with CouchDB. Boy was I wrong. What I found was a book that has you build a complete working application. And by complete, I mean you'll add the Twitter Bootstrap framework and it will be sexy. You'll do things the hard way, and refactor with an easier method. You'll be building a PHP framework with controllers and views. You'll be integrating a third party library for communicating with CouchDB which follows a similar simplistic approach as the framework. You'll also be keeping track of everything in GIT and committing to GitHub. These are all very important things for any application developer to know, and this book will get you into some good habits.The book starts off with an introduction to general NoSQL concepts (schema-less, fast), as well as the history of database systems. It then gets into the history of CouchDB itself. Nothing in there was too surprising, however the author did put a larger emphasis on the lack of ACID compliance than I have seen elsewhere (which means data isn't 100% guaranteed). This is a great thing to point out; it prevents CouchDB from being a fit for many projects (such as financial) however perfect for other projects (high traffic logging applications) and the risk and reward gradient for every application in-between.The author also guides the reader through the complete OS X setup process for getting Apache started, configuring it to work with PHP, getting the homebrew package manager working and subsequently CouchDB installed, running, and persisting between restarts. This means the beginning programmer can take on building this application without any prior knowledge of PHP development. I thought this was a great touch, it is probably the biggest thing holding back people from programming.Overall, this book does a great job explaining REST and the HTTP verbs, how those translate into their CRUD counterparts, how JSON is a great data language to be sent over the wire. Early on we use command line cURL for interacting with the CouchDB server, a slightly tedius method. I absolutely LOVE that the author had us run through cURL requests in the command line BEFORE sending us to the web-based GUI administration app, Futon. This puts a huge emphasis on exactly what kind of data is sent over the wire, something most MySQL developers, for example, will never know.In the third chapter of the book, the author has us dive into securing our CouchDB installation. This is an important topic that could have been otherwise omitted, since it isn't necessary to get an application up and running. By default, CouchDB is insecure, and many a developer may not ever realize this until something bad happens. By calling it out early on, the code doesn't need a large refactor later on to bolt-on authentication.The book has us building a simple PHP framework, named Bones by the author. Of course, we could have skipped building this framework and simply used raw PHP scripts (e.g. having .php extensions in your address bar). This would have been a bit easier for the reader to handle, and wouldn't have required the configuration of mod_rewrite in apache.conf. However, by using this framework, the reader is more likely to explore different frameworks down the road, instead of taking a simpler route. There is a small risk though that the user won't fully understand how Apache maps URI requests to the filesystem. Overall though, by having pretty URLs the completed application looks and feels like more of a solid accomplishment, bringing confidence to the reader.Another thing worth mentioning about the Bones framework is that it makes heavy use of PHPs Anonymous Functions. I personally love this method, as it feels a lot like the Node.js Express framework. PHP didn't get support for Anonymous Functions until version 5.3, which did come out a few years ago and is largely the standard. As a PHP beginner, by learning recent features of the languages, they may be more likely to grok the language than users learning from antiquated tutorials. The framework is currently hosted on GitHub, but it appears largely dead, not having been updated in a year.The author also guides the reader step-by-step through creating a GitHub account, something that can be a little scary to beginners. I used to teach a PHP meetup regularly, and getting an account setup was one of the hardest things to do (it would require an entire session). Creating an SSH key, and doing other configurations on the command line can be daunting, but it really is necessary. So many great projects are hosted on GitHub and the sooner a developer can get in the club the better. After each big milestone, the author has us committing our changes and pushing to GitHub. This is an excellent habit to get into and the author puts a good emphasis on it.When it gets time to have PHP begin communicating with CouchDB, the author has us do so using the cURL library built in to PHP. While cURL is incredibly powerful, it is very difficult for beginners to use. It is also overly verbose. It is generally not appreciated by the PHP crowd and there are many libraries (such as Requests for PHP) built to encapsulate the difficulty with a clean, Object Oriented interface. Luckily for us, the author was using cURL to show us one way of doing things (e.g. the hard way) before switching to a better solution. He soon has us install a library specifically meant for working with CouchDB called Sag, which follows the same beginner-friendly, simple methodology as the Bones framework. He also guides us through refactoring our existing code.The Bones framework soon gets an upgrade as we add a PHP autoloader to load Sag (and later the rest of our classes). The author really does a great job of "sneaking" in a lot good practices like this. Some other nice things that sneak their way in are using Gravatar for displaying users avatars, and using simple jQuery calls for making DELETE requests and fading out newly deleted items. There is also an emphasis on code refactoring and removing redundant code, and the reason we do so is explained nicely.Of course, the application we've bene building so far is not the prettiest (Times New Roman is everyones enemy after all). Thankfully, we soon add support for the Twitter Bootstrap framework. This allows us to quickly get a good looking website up with minimal HTML boilerplate code. Throughout the book we display code in the browser using normal text, then spruce it up with markup to follow Bootstrap methodologies.A lot of PHP developers start by using MySQL as their Database System. To help make the transition to a NoSQL database system easier for those developers, the author often compares a schema-less CouchDB document to an equivalent MySQL tables and relationships. The two approaches to building database management systems are quite different, so this is a helpful comparison.At the end of the book, we take out application and deploy it to some cloud services. The author has us go through the process of setting up a PHP Fog hosting account, as well as a Cloudant CouchDB hosting account, and of course getting the two to communicate. Both of these services offer free accounts, so this doesn't hold back the user. The account setup pages have screenshots for us to follow along and we are told how to get the PHP application to connect to the remote CouchDB instance. We also take our local CouchDB and have it replicate to the remote server, a nice feature which didn't have to make the cut for a beginners book.One thing that I didn't quite understand is why we used the CouchDB _users database instead of rolling our own. It could be that I'm not as familiar with CouchDB as I should be, but it seems like an application specific way would be better than a database specific method. CouchDB uses salted SHA1 password encryption, which we've seen a lot of negative press around over the past year or so. By rolling our own encryption we could have used a more secure encryption such as bcrypt.Another thing I wasn't a fan of was enabling hidden files in Finder. Personally, I would have had the users use the `ls` command in terminal, and mention that there are hidden files that aren't normally shown in Finder. For editing the config files, we could have used the `mate` command provided with Textmate (the text editor the author suggests). By using the command line more it might have made the reader a little more comfortable with it. Thankfully the author does provide a command to disable hidden files once we're done.Overall, CouchDB and PHP Web Development Beginner's Guide is an amazing book for any beginner looking to get into building PHP applications to persist data using CouchDB. There are many good practices sprinkled into the pages within. Anyone running a computer with OS X can follow along, even if they have no prior experience with programming or databases. The verbose code explanations do a great job explaining what the author is having us build. If you are interested in either of these technologies I highly recommend picking up this book.

The author does a terrific job complementing the learning with actual coding to reinforce what I'm reading. Really enjoying it and recommend for anyone seeking to learn CouchDB with PHP

Recently I have been researching about NoSQL, I was looking for a NoSQL database to add more capability to one of my web applications. And I heard something good about CouchDB, I went to the CouchDB official website, I had a quick read at the documentation, however, there're not much tutorials and books about CouchDB and PHP until this book CouchDB and PHP Web Development Beginner's Guide has been published. I found this book is a great resource for learning how the CouchDB and PHP work for web development.The hands-on tutorial writing style that make complicated concept easier to understand, we just need to follow every step, we will discover and learn more through each step. The great thing is not just follow the steps, the author also explain "What Just Happened" for each step that have done. This make me easier to understand the code better, not like some books, we just follow and put the code, run it, it's work, and no explanation about what just happened about the example codes.One of the best parts that I really like is the author teaches you to create a PHP MVC framework called "Bones framework" with CouchDB database, this book teach you how to build a best practices PHP and CouchDB web application from scratch. The author also inform us to use Git (version control system) to commit your code once you have done the changes to your code. This is a great practice to use version control system to keep track of your source code while developing our application. I am really impressed with details like this, it's not just teach you one thing, and forget the others, the author also teach you good programming practice when building a PHP and CouchDB web application.This is the beginner's guide series of the book, however, this book is not easy for beginner to understand. You need or recommend to have experience in object oriented PHP programming, and understand what MVC Model-View-Controller design pattern is, and also have experience using command line for basic system operations.

I like the way this book is written. Software books are always nice when you can be taken on a journey through learning (provided you have the time) and this book takes time to introduce you to lots of techniques and tools that will make CouchDB development easier and more organised. For someone wanting to swap an SQL database for a NoSQL database, whilst keeping the server-side programming consistent with previous methods, then this book is great. I'm looking to do this so that the site and data management can be kept separate and take some of the load off the CouchDB developer. However, at the rate that these technologies are changing, along with the errors you are likely to encounter developing anything in CouchDB, you'll find the IRC channel and stackoverflow far more use.