Rating: 
Summary: Cookbook's galore
Review: Among the PHP cookbooks in the market today, this one's good but lacks sufficient depth in coverage. It unfortunately has nothing more to offer than the PHP developers cookbook (II Edition). Infact,i found the latter to be more comprehensive and well-written. Another book, that is not actually labelled a cookbook, but is chockfull of completely re-usable solutions for web developers is the PHP4 Web Development Solutions book.
Rating: 
Summary: A valuable asset for any developer
Review: An excellent cookbook, following the old O'Reilly's tradition in the field. The recipes are clean, concise and elegant; the authors try to solve real world, common problems. Unlike other outdated books, the code is designed with PHP 4.2 or above in mind. A valuable asset for any developer, it assumes a decent understanding of PHP
Rating:
Summary: Best Book on the Market
Review: Comprehensive and well-written. Has great depth and creative case study solutions. Sklar and Trachtenberg 's PHP Cookbook has more to offer than any other book on the market.
Rating:
Summary: great php book
Review: Full of usable real world examples. Combine this book with some of the great php community web forums and the php.net manual and you are all set.
While I did find some errors in the book, a quick email to the publisher tended to get a quick response and one good thing about O'Reilly is they maintain a list of confirmed errors on the book webpage along with downloads of all examples.
In general its a great book for someone who knows programming and wants to pick up php, but probably not for the beginner who knows nothing.
The book's weakest point is probably dealing with objects and classes.
Rating:
Summary: Truly helpful!
Review: Great book! Full of helpful info and easy to understand. Wonderful asset to have.
Rating: 
Summary: A very good "cookbook" reference
Review: I have been programming PHP for a couple of years, and have lots of books on the subject. IMHO, I felt like this book serves the role of a "cookbook" very nicely. The contents are organized by language function via chapters (i.e. strings, numbers, arrays, regex, forms, classes, db, security, XML, etc...) which makes it convenient to find what you are looking for. Within each chapter, are very specific "Problem" and "Solutions" which contain simple code snippets (like 10 lines or less) and a description of what it does. Most problems are solved within one page. It is really concise and to the point. The index is comprehensive so it is straightforward to lookup the issue you are having, find the problem / solution and get on with your coding. You don't have to read thru lots of code or descriptions of why somebody setup a display template or complicated object. Look up your problem, read a quick solution, and BOOM, you're done and back to implementing it in your code.I have read some other reviews for this book here that recommend the Wrox book, stating this one is too simple. I don't agree with this. The Wrox book appears to me to be another "... let's show you a bunch of full blown application examples ..." book to me, similar to the classic Welling and Thomson SAMS published text. The "cookbook" will not teach you the language, nor is that its intent; it assumes you know what you are doing. This book is exactly what it says it is, a cookbook. If you need a quick solution to specific coding problems, at a fairly advanced level, it is a really good reference.
Rating:
Summary: A very good "cookbook" reference
Review: I have been programming PHP for a couple of years, and have lots of books on the subject. IMHO, I felt like this book serves the role of a "cookbook" very nicely. The contents are organized by language function via chapters (i.e. strings, numbers, arrays, regex, forms, classes, db, security, XML, etc...) which makes it convenient to find what you are looking for. Within each chapter, are very specific "Problem" and "Solutions" which contain simple code snippets (like 10 lines or less) and a description of what it does. Most problems are solved within one page. It is really concise and to the point. The index is comprehensive so it is straightforward to lookup the issue you are having, find the problem / solution and get on with your coding. You don't have to read thru lots of code or descriptions of why somebody setup a display template or complicated object. Look up your problem, read a quick solution, and BOOM, you're done and back to implementing it in your code. I have read some other reviews for this book here that recommend the Wrox book, stating this one is too simple. I don't agree with this. The Wrox book appears to me to be another "... let's show you a bunch of full blown application examples ..." book to me, similar to the classic Welling and Thomson SAMS published text. The "cookbook" will not teach you the language, nor is that its intent; it assumes you know what you are doing. This book is exactly what it says it is, a cookbook. If you need a quick solution to specific coding problems, at a fairly advanced level, it is a really good reference.
Rating:
Summary: A very good "cookbook" reference
Review: I have been programming PHP for a couple of years, and have lots of books on the subject. IMHO, I felt like this book serves the role of a "cookbook" very nicely. The contents are organized by language function via chapters (i.e. strings, numbers, arrays, regex, forms, classes, db, security, XML, etc...) which makes it convenient to find what you are looking for. Within each chapter, are very specific "Problem" and "Solutions" which contain simple code snippets (like 10 lines or less) and a description of what it does. Most problems are solved within one page. It is really concise and to the point. The index is comprehensive so it is straightforward to lookup the issue you are having, find the problem / solution and get on with your coding. You don't have to read thru lots of code or descriptions of why somebody setup a display template or complicated object. Look up your problem, read a quick solution, and BOOM, you're done and back to implementing it in your code. I have read some other reviews for this book here that recommend the Wrox book, stating this one is too simple. I don't agree with this. The Wrox book appears to me to be another "... let's show you a bunch of full blown application examples ..." book to me, similar to the classic Welling and Thomson SAMS published text. The "cookbook" will not teach you the language, nor is that its intent; it assumes you know what you are doing. This book is exactly what it says it is, a cookbook. If you need a quick solution to specific coding problems, at a fairly advanced level, it is a really good reference.
Rating:
Summary: I am so lucky to have found this book
Review: I have never written a review before, but I felt that I needed to put my 5-star vote in as my small token of thanks to the authors. So here it goes:
I have dabbled in PHP for a few months now, but am developing a php/mysql app for the first time. I refer to this book every single day. It's my favorite Oracle. I ask, it answers:
"How do I $MyDailyQuestion?"
"See page $MyDailyAnswer."
Sure puts a smile on my face!
This book does not make me read through pages and pages of code and explanation. Just enough code snippets and the most insightful reminders to help me solve my daily how-do-I's. It also tells you where to look up further info for each function/feature on-line.
I think you would love this book as much as I do if:
- you are somewhere between PHP super-newbie and super-master
- you have a pretty solid background in some other language
- you are using PHP now and have problems to solve everyday
- you learn well from small examples
- your vision starts to blur when presented with long chapters
My thanks to authors Sklar and Trachtenberg! Happy hunting.
Rating:
Summary: ORA Cookbook Vs. WROX Solutions
Review: I ordered a copy of the "PHP Cookbook ORA", along with a copy of the "Professional PHP 4 web Development Solutions WROX". Upon reading both these books, i thought i should offer a honest review comparing the two: Both the books were informative in their own right o The ORA book had small snippets of code based solutions (very similar to the PHP Developers cookbook from Sterling and Andrei) that are very useful for programmers who are confounded with small to medium coding problems. However, there was nothing enterprising about the coverage, that one could not achieve from using a combination of the online docs + mailing lists. Another downside was that i could not find full solutions that i could re-use in my projects. On the Other hand, i found o The WROX book offered complete solutions to real world problems - a Simple/advanced CMS (the core of which you can plug into your site), a simple search engine, a classified ads board, and lots of cool creative case study solutions that i could extend to use in my hobby sites. The content was very enterprising and all of the solutions presented are the most popular one's amongst web developers these days. More interesting is that these solutions can be completely re-used and extended into your projects. However, the downside of this book is that you would need to have prior PHP knowledge either picked up from WROX' Professional PHP 4 (as is mentioned as a pre-requisite in the book) or from the Programming PHP ORA, or any another competent professional PHP programming books in the market. So the bottomline is: oCare for an appetiser - Pick up the ORA book.
oCare for a full meal - Pick up the Wrox book. I am posting this same review for both the books (so customers can benefit from it). However, i have ranked the Wrox book, a notch above this one, simply because i wanted a burp:-)
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