This review has been pending for a while, but recently I finished reading Derick Rethans’ book: Date and Time Programming. At first glance the topic of the book might lead you to think “why do I need a book to teach me about such a simple topic” ? But further investigation and hard experience will show you that handling date and time in software development is not always as straightforward as “Its twelve o’clock”. Derick’s book provides an in depth look at handling various aspects of date and time such as timezones and days that do not exist, and it delivers something that is missing from php.net: documentation for the DateTime Object.
The book covers a lot of ground, even though it looks rather thin. Derick does a wonderful job of introducing date/time matter in the opening chapter, covering all the calendar switches (Julian to Gregorian) and its complexities (did you know Feb 30th has already happened once?) as well as timezones, solar times and details of daylight-saving time. This is all invaluable information for anyone working with dates.
The remaining chapters delve into the various operations we use with and around date and time, like parsing, representing and manipulating date and time values. It directs attention to various features of the PHP functions that handles timezones and daylight savings. Its also very interesting that the book fully covers and makes crystal clear the new features in PHP 5.3 that pertains to this topic.
The book explores PHP internals and describes how to use timezones and to update the internal timezone database, as well as how to deal with database engines and still get back correctly timezoned dates.
Guide to Date and Time Programming is a really pleasant read. In a very orderly fashion Derick covers all the steps before introducing new issues, instead of just raising issues without fully explaining what they are about. The book functions very well as reference book, since documentation on this topic is not all it should be in the PHP Manual. This is a must-read book for anyone that has ever had to deal with handling date or time in a PHP system, or anyone who plans on launching systems that are aware of timezone differences.
php/architect’s Guide to Date and Time Programming
by Derick Rethans
Paperback: 152 pages
Publisher: Marco Tabini & Associates, Inc. (April 20, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0981034500
ISBN-13: 978-0981034508
Available from Amazon
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