Rating: 
Summary: wait for 2nd edition due 1/2004
Review: just a quick addition to my review. i noticed that the badly needed 2nd edition i said was needed is indeed coming out in january of 2004. do yourself a favor and wait for it if you can.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Book for Beginners
Review: Just starting out with PHP? Then this is the book you need to read. Also, Larry Ullman's PHP Advanced Quickstart Guide picks up where this one ends, providing advanced material in the same familiar format as this book.
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Summary: This guide to PHP is a great intro -- PLUS online discussion
Review: Larry Ullman provides a clear and excellent intro to PHP in this 2nd edition. I am a beginnning programmer and I have found this to be not only a really clear introduction, but also a reference manual as I go along. Plus, the author has created an online discussion forum that is actually active and works. From my somewhat thorough review, this is the best intro PHP book out there! Joshua
Ogden Little Bags
http://www.ogdenlittle.com
Rating:
Summary: This guide to PHP is a great intro -- PLUS online discussion
Review: Larry Ullman provides a clear and excellent intro to PHP in this 2nd edition. I am a beginnning programmer and I have found this to be not only a really clear introduction, but also a reference manual as I go along. Plus, the author has created an online discussion forum that is actually active and works. From my somewhat thorough review, this is the best intro PHP book out there! Joshua
Ogden Little Bags
http://www.ogdenlittle.com
Rating:
Summary: Great for beginners.
Review: Never programmed before? Want to learn a fairly easy scripting language? If you said "Yes" then this book is definately for you. Very clear and concise instructions. I look forward to the advanced book coming out soon. Andy
Rating:
Summary: Great Concept for an Introductory Book
Review: Peachpit's Visual Quickstart Guide philosophy is just about the best I've seen in getting you started in a new technology quickly. They seem to follow the philosophy of getting a fairly complex task programmed and running quickly. Then you can look around and see the individual steps that made it happen.
The way they do this is with an awful lot of screen shots with a fairly minimal amount of typing.
This is combined with a well thought out and complete index and allows you to quickly find out about any of the details that you might have missed.
There's only one real complaint I have about the book. It's printed using two columns per page. This makes reading some of the instructions more difficult (since they are multi line) than if there was only one column.
Great way to get started quickly.
Rating: 
Summary: A good introduction to PHP
Review: PHP for the WWW is a great book if you are just starting out with PHP and have a little programming experience. It has a lot of great examples, most of them easy to follow. The thing I like most is that fact that it explains every little deatil of code they write. The chapter on databases (MySQL, to be exact) is my favorite, and probably the most useful. The book is a little short (not even 250 pages). I find that the worst part of the book is the explanation on how to configure PHP to work with Apache on Windows and Linux, and it doesn't delve into configuring MySQL Server at all. (***)P>Overall, a good book although what it is lacking in is fairly cruicial.
Rating:
Summary: Solid, but slim...
Review: PHP is a wonderfull beast, and Larry Ullman does a very good job of presenting it from the ground up. He assumes only that the reader has computer experience and understands HTML. Although previous programming experience is helpfull, his approach is such that it is not needed.
He works through in a very solid manner, building scripts that he uses in latter chapters to do something different, so it is a very good book to work along with.
The minus points are in that it seems almost rushed at times, and it is the slimest Visual Quickstart Guide I have ever seen. It is half the size of ELizabrth Castro's HTML book (same price) and about a third the size of DHTML/CSS by Jason Teague Cranford (...).
That would be fine if he didn't constantly say 'that is beyond the scope of this book', sometimes that statement is valid because of the technical depth involved, other times it seems it would have required another chapter which they didn't have time to bother with.
Also it appears as if an advantced version of this book is due out in a couple of weeks, so it looks like they are trying to put PHP into two books, as they have done with Flash and other topics. The manufacturers price is (...)for that which is much higher than the VQG norm, so I can only hope it is a much bigger and complete beast. I shall be buying it...
Rating: 
Summary: A step back for literature on PHP
Review: PHP is constantly moving forward. Version 4 which came out about a year ago, includes functionality such as support for objects and sessions, that make PHP a much more viable solution for robust web applications. This book ignores that functionality. Regardless of this book being for beginners, there have been other books out on PHP4 for almost a year (such as Teach Yourself PHP4 in 24 hours) that are also geared toward the same audience yet don't ignore these important topics. What this book does is akin to a college reverting from C/C++/Java to make COBOL their vehicle for teaching computer science. Sure, you'll learn the minimum basics, but what are you going to do when you confront some PHP code that includes objects and sessions? You are going to be clueless and you are going to have to go out and buy another book. If you are an amateur webmaster and are in need of SOME coverage of PHP basics, I recommend OReilly's Webmaster in a Nutshell instead, because it ALSO covers Apache, CGI/Perl, HTML, Javascript, etcetera. Sure you may need to buy something else on PHP4 in the long run, but you will get a grounding in so many other essential topics, ALL for a very reasonable price as computer books go. PS....this is a note to the authors/publishers which Amazon is free to remove: QUIT YOUR SMEAR CAMPAIGN WHERE YOU RATE REVIEWS AS UNHELPFUL BECAUSE YOU DON'T LIKE THEM. It's unethical, and another reason to not buy this book.
Rating:
Summary: Beginners could begin here
Review: Recently I decided to try PHP for a little task, involving forms, file scanning with regexp, and other basic things. Although I've scanned numerous online PHP guides before, I wasn't sure how to do this, so I went to the local computer store and scanned the PHP titles. Many books filled those shelves, and I had little time to scan them. But then I spied a peachpit book on the topic, and since I've found them helpful (and inexpensive) before, I picked it up without even scanning it. This was Larry Ullman's book. Within minutes I had a basic idea how to do what I wanted, and within an hour I had code working. Now, some of this is just that php is a good language -- and a familiar one, to Perl users like myself -- but part of it is that Ullman has crafted a fine little book, easy to navigate and easy to digest. Like all Peachpit books, this is aimed at beginners. And, like most computer books, the details matter less than the framework. I gather, from other reviews I've seen on Amazon, that this book suffers some errors, e.g. in a discussion of prime numbers. I'm not sure I care, or that others should care. This is because I can't imagine reading this book (or any computer guide) from cover to cover, studying the details. Rather, readers do what I did. I needed to know how to open and read a file, so I looked in the table of contents and flipped to a page stating clearly how to do that. Ten seconds of scanning, plus a minute of study, and I was back to my text editor, typing in code. Ditto on the use of regular expressions (which is done in an odd non-perlish way in PHP). Did I read all the details of regular expressions? Lord, no. I just found the name of the subroutine, checked whether the search string or the pattern goes first, and I was back to my coding. This is the essence of computer books of this ilk. The _defining_ textbook should be very clear, very detailed, and very accurate. (Think of Kernighan and Ritchie for the C language.) But a quick-start guide is not meant to be studied labouriously. It is meant to be flipped through one evening, and then put beside the terminal the next day. Finding information should be quick, and digesting it should require scanning only a page or so. In these regards, Ullman's book shines. Another factor is cost. This book was about 1/3 of the competitors in my local store. One should admit that these books are really throwaway items anyway, since once you get familiar you'll go to online resources of the latest developments. This might argue that cost is significant, and that the best scheme is to buy a cheap and digestable guide to get started, switching to online resources once you've reached your stride. In a nutshell, this is what I like about Peachpit books, Ullman's being no exception. The bottom line is that it got me coding in a few minutes, really, within the time it took me to write these words!
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