Rating: 
Summary: Great book for beginners (such as myself)...
Review: I am somewhat new to programming, even newer to PHP. I have spent hours and hours in local bookstores trying to discern which book to buy. I have now owned 4 books on PHP -- 3 of which have been returned. This is the only one I've kept. Why? Every other book I have looked at is either (a) information overload, or (b) takes forgranted a certain level of programming experience. WHO IS THIS BOOK FOR? The beginning programmer--*not* just the beginning "PHP-er," but the beginning programmer. If you have a decent amount of programming experience, this book will be too basic for you. If you have little or no programming experience, this book is *perfect.* So far every line of code used has been explained so that the beginning coded can not just copy down a bunch of code, but actually LEARN programming concepts in general, and in PHP in particular. ARE THERE ERRORS IN THE BOOK? Errors exist in *every* computer book I've ever touched. If you are looking for a book without errors, don't buy one, you will be disappointed. (Two of the other three PHP books I briefly owned were plagued with errors, one even came with a CD which was missing chapter 2 code, thus rendering the book/CD useless. The third book likely was error filled, I didn't keep it around long enough to find out.) However, there is a companion website .... which lists and corrects known errors...and it appears the list is updated when needed. Also, I emailed the author about an area not covered in his book and he promptly emailed me back. I only hesitate to give this book 5 Stars because I am not the world's biggest fan of the "Visual Quickstart" layout. If you've gotten along fine with other Visual Quickstart books, this one is probably one of the best. (Do not compare this book to the horrible JavaScript book put out by Visual Quickstart, as there is no comparison.) Without reservation, I recommend this book for the beginning--even intermediate--programmer who wants to LEARN, not just copy, PHP.
Rating:
Summary: A great start
Review: I decided to get myself into some coding and wanted a 'teach myself' style book to guide me along and this has done just that.
If you need to start somewhere I'd recommend starting with this as it made everything very clear and straightforward for me.
If I had anything bad to say it would be that the references to diagrams and their content can go a tad awry but it's easy to see what's meant.
All in all, I'm very pleased I bought the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Not A Good PeachPit Book
Review: I did not like this book at all. Yes it uses the Peachpit
Format (which is good) but many of the examples are not
thought out well and do not illustrate concepts well.
I actually returned my book. Array description was
awkward and I had to reread the sessions chapter
several times (and gave up in frustration). This appears to
be quickly done to fill the Peachpit format.
I recommend passing on the book.
Rating:
Summary: A real beginner
Review: I don't know anything about programming. But this books helps to make those first steps. It's easy to follow. Don't expect that you become a wiz kid off it. But expect that once you learnt this book you have a understanding how it all works and you be able to move one to the next step. I certainly would recoumend it for absolute starters and not for those who already know to programe...
Rating: 
Summary: Covers JUST the basics of PHP
Review: I found this book to be somewhat helpful but ultimately not worth the while. It covers the very basic aspects of PHP and leaves the reader looking elsewhere for the infromation. I would reccomend Luke Welling and Laura Thomson's 'PHP and MySQL Web Development' immediately over this book.
Rating: 
Summary: A very good book
Review: I had never used PHP before, and found this book very helpful. It had lots of examples and made it very easy to understand. I learnt how to do everything mentioned in the book in a couple of days.
Rating:
Summary: How to learn PHP
Review: I have picked up "PHP for the World Wide Web Visual Quickstart Guide by Larry Ullman" and love the book. From reading his easy to follow hands on examples in the book I taught myself PHP and mySQL in 3 days. His book was very informative and enabled me to redo my entire site in PHP. I have emailed the author on different questions and problems and have received very helpful and informative replies. I would definately recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn PHP.
Rating:
Summary: So far so good with one minor hiccup
Review: I just purchased this book and although it says it covers PHP3 & 4, it managed to leave out one minor detail which took me about 2 hours to figure out. Chapter 2 covers variables. While I have some programming background in ASP and JavaScript, I am new to PHP. I am aware of how variables work. This book referenced variables as $variable which isn't a problem for PHP4. However I am using PHP4.3.2 which defaults register_globals=Off. Variables cannot be reference in this manner. It took me a couple of hours surfing php.net and other resources to figure this out. One I made the change to register_globals=ON, the code in the book worked just fine with no errors. Needless to say, it has slowed my progress down a bit, but I am still pluggin my way through. I have one other PHP book, but it is geared toward Dreamweaver MX and requires almost no hand coding. In order to learn the language, I felt the need to learn to hand code first. So far this book lays it all out nicely. The tips are worth reading a second time. I just wish they had mentioned the register_globals bit. It would have saved me a few hours and got me to bed at a decent hour.
Rating:
Summary: So far so good with one minor hiccup
Review: I just purchased this book and although it says it covers PHP3 & 4, it managed to leave out one minor detail which took me about 2 hours to figure out. Chapter 2 covers variables. While I have some programming background in ASP and JavaScript, I am new to PHP. I am aware of how variables work. This book referenced variables as $variable which isn't a problem for PHP4. However I am using PHP4.3.2 which defaults register_globals=Off. Variables cannot be reference in this manner. It took me a couple of hours surfing php.net and other resources to figure this out. One I made the change to register_globals=ON, the code in the book worked just fine with no errors. Needless to say, it has slowed my progress down a bit, but I am still pluggin my way through. I have one other PHP book, but it is geared toward Dreamweaver MX and requires almost no hand coding. In order to learn the language, I felt the need to learn to hand code first. So far this book lays it all out nicely. The tips are worth reading a second time. I just wish they had mentioned the register_globals bit. It would have saved me a few hours and got me to bed at a decent hour.
Rating:
Summary: Nothing on sessions....don't bother
Review: I picked this up in a local bookstore. There is no entry on "sessions" in the index. If you don't know what sessions are then maybe this book would be OK. If you do know, avoid this book. And even if you don't know, there are other introductory PHP books that will also expose you to sessions. They are one of the most useful concepts behind web applications, not only with PHP but also ASP and Java Servlets. For a book on PHP to not cover them does a real disservice. Web developers are generally looked upon as hacks -- and with good cause if you don't know sessions.
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