Rating: 
Summary: I don't like it
Review: * I am an experienced programmer. I finished the first seven chapters in one day. Because the book is good or because I got used to programming ?? I am not sure.* The second day (today) I read chapter 8 Database. I can not understand anything X-( They say something like For more on SQL, see SQL in a Nutshell X-( And I don't know any about Databases so I can not read it. * The rest of the books cover some topics that I'm currently not interested in, I haven't read them, so I can not give any comments about these chapters. (in fact I have read some parts I think they are fine because I can understand :D) * The way the authors present information is not clear either. I think they put a little effort on it. Everything is so brief. This is definitely not a 5* book.
4* ?? No. I am not pleased.
3* ? Well, I got some basis of PHP. Thank the authors :-)
Rating:
Summary: I don't like it
Review: * I am an experienced programmer. I finished the first seven chapters in one day. Because the book is good or because I got used to programming ?? I am not sure. * The second day (today) I read chapter 8 Database. I can not understand anything X-( They say something like For more on SQL, see SQL in a Nutshell X-( And I don't know any about Databases so I can not read it. * The rest of the books cover some topics that I'm currently not interested in, I haven't read them, so I can not give any comments about these chapters. (in fact I have read some parts I think they are fine because I can understand :D) * The way the authors present information is not clear either. I think they put a little effort on it. Everything is so brief. This is definitely not a 5* book.
4* ?? No. I am not pleased.
3* ? Well, I got some basis of PHP. Thank the authors :-)
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent intermediate level book
Review: An excellent intermediate level book, the authors in depth knowledge of the inner working of PHP make the difference, especially when they suggest better practices. After a brief introduction to the language (too brief for most beginners), it covers many topics, from strings and array, to the more advanced chapters on XML, PDF and image generation.
Buyers must be aware that the database section is pretty limited and focus on using PEAR and around 100 pages are dedicated to a function reference that may be somewhat redundant for many developers
Rating:
Summary: good stuff
Review: easy to read and very illuminating on the working of PHP, however, I was hoping for more dirty details and advanced examples. Basically a thicker book would have made me happy
Rating: 
Summary: Shallow Content, Many Errors, Poor Examples
Review: I almost always turn to O'Reilly first when purchasing a new reference book, however this time I was disappointed. This book is fairly shallow in content and much of the information that you need is actually buried in the text instead of being presented as a topic unto itself. The thing that is the most bothersome, however, is the plethora of flat out errors. Many of the examples have typos, missing code, etc. Even as a PHP novice I was constantly spotting errors which is frustrating when you're trying to learn the language. On top of that, many of the examples exhibit just plain bad programming form (inefficient code, variables that are only used once, etc). It's the kind of thing that makes a seasoned programmer wince (and if I was reviewing the code I would send it back to the author with lots of red ink).
Rating:
Summary: Too shallow
Review: I was disappointed in this book. The title implies that the book would cover PHP in the same manner that Programming Perl (from the same publisher) covers Perl, but this is not true. Programming Perl is a very good in-depth reference for Perl, and I still use it frequently. Programming PHP is much too shallow, and I usually have to refer to the online PHP manual available at php.net instead.
Rating:
Summary: Too shallow
Review: I was disappointed in this book. The title implies that the book would cover PHP in the same manner that Programming Perl (from the same publisher) covers Perl, but this is not true. Programming Perl is a very good in-depth reference for Perl, and I still use it frequently. Programming PHP is much too shallow, and I usually have to refer to the online PHP manual available at php.net instead.
Rating: 
Summary: Great resource
Review: I've had this book for a few months now and I have to say it's really a great PHP resource all around. It's very clear, has great examples and best of all is inexpensive. I have other PHP books and this is the one I always consult first, and often last.
Rating:
Summary: not worthed
Review: It sure tries to teach you something but cannot achieve...
As everyone mentioned before, it has countless errors and typos. But there is more than that. Book is out of focus. Examples makes no sense and not related to each other, which is very confusing.
A piece of code here and other piece is there. Every example is coming out of nowhere. It doesn't have a project. So everytime different variables, situations. Like, in one example it uses Flintstones character names ($name=Fred, $name2 = fred etc.). Next example is subjects of a class (math, science, history, english etc.), on other one it uses very random strings like ("I like paris in november", "the key is in my pants")
If you want to learn PHP, stick with "PHP and MySQL Web Development, Second Edition" By Luke Welling, Laura Thompson.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: O Reilly publishes the best programming books--they're accurate, elegant and get to the point quickly. Unfortunately, this book is an exception. I agree with the complaints of the other reviewers, e.g., the text has buried information and incorrect examples. However, my main ojection is the index. It appears that the authors simply searched for every keyword in the book then tabulated them in the index. Thus, the index is hardly useful. It's no good to look through several pages just to find that the keyword was used once in a passing sentence that has little to do with that topic.
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