Rating: 
Summary: Advanced best-practices EVERYONE should be aware of
Review: This book introduces and elaborates on very good programming practices that not many self-made programmers are aware of. I've had contact with some 5 or 6 other programming languages at university and I've had my share of contact with good programming practices, but they were never presented to me so clear-cut and in a so motivating way as in this book. That, alongside with the fact that I just love PHP, makes this the absolutely most important book I would recommend to any fellow programmer.This book doesn't teach PHP, it teaches efficiency, maintainability and some really good programming notions. The fact that it uses PHP as a vehicle is just the icing on the cake. The source code used is manytimes from real open source projects, a nice effort from the author.
Oh, and I would also like to mention the author's style of writing: he comes across as a very open-minded individual who routinely recognises his own errors and isn't in any way superior to the rest of us not-so-enlightned programmers.
On a final note, let me just say I wish my copy of this book would magically turn into a spell-checked hardcover edition :)
Rating: 
Summary: Very Good Concept Book
Review: This book preaches very good concepts that are good guidelines to follow if you plan on conducting a multi-developer PHP project. It touches on many things such as coding standards, revision control with cvs, seperation of business and display logic using a template engine (smarty used as example), a brief discussion on object-oriented methodologies, and other useful development areas. He cites many "futher readings" in context which I found extremely helpful. All the examples in the book are very easy to understand and somewhat pertain to "real-world" situations (I found this a big plus since I don't like real abstract examples).
I have two complaints with the book (these are not THAT important and you should not buy this book just because of these two reasons. The book is VERY good for most PHP developers).
1 - I don't consider this that "advanced" of a book. I have been using this type of stuff for years now at my current work place -- although this would advanced for most "non-enterprise" developers (where teams are more than 5 or so).
2 - The lack of coding standard being used in the examples (something that he preaches about in one of the first chapters).
Other than those two complaints, this is great book for PHP developers looking to do stuff in a more "enterprise" way.
Rating: 
Summary: A Random Walk Through Web Programming with PHP
Review: This not a terrible book -- it's a decent book with a poor title. It should be called something like "A Random Walk Through Web Programming with PHP." There's certainly nothing advanced about it. This book would be ideal for someone who has just learned PHP but lacks any real knowledge of computer science.
Rating:
Summary: I love this book
Review: Wow, I love this book! Not just because the content is great, but also because the other has his head held high. PHP is fine environment for doing web development and we should be proud, especially with version 5, which this book covers in depth. The book starts with PHP coding patterns, then covers design patterns in the second chapter. This is wonderful because the PHP community needs to understand these principles and embrace them. With PHP 5 we now have support in the tool to build high quality well-architected web sites, and this book points the way right from the get-go. Chapter four covers Smarty. It's a good, though brief introduction. It's still better than that standard documentation. If you don't know about Smarty you should really check it out. It's a great way to separate the user interface from the business logic. Chapter six covers unit testing and test driven design. The coverage is concise and doesn't pander to the reader. The examples are bit abstract. But the section is valuable as an introduction to the topic and to it's implementation with PHP. The book then continues on into truly advanced topics such as extending PHP using the SAPI, web services, caching, performance and profiling and a number of other topics.
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