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Summary: great place to start
Review: i bought this book knowing nothing about php and it took me from ground 0 to writing pretty complex apps using php and mysql - i know it will serve as a great reference book for years to come. thanks!
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Summary: A great introductory book
Review: I found beginning PHP4 very helpful, easy to understand with good examples. I think it is the ideal book for someone to start learning PHP. Really worths a try.
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Summary: This and PHP Cookbook are all you need
Review: I have bought or borrowed every book on PHP. I am very decent now - but could have saved a lot of money with this book - and the online PHP.net manual. Meaning - this book will get you going from ground zero - and the manual plus commentaries (commentaries are golden) are great. The cookbook has been my second treasure trove - it is a must buy once you get your chops underway.
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Summary: Beginning PHP4 - Don't Start Here
Review: I have long been a fan of Wrox books, but if "Beginning PHP4" had been the first one I read, I probably would not have purchased another. It solves no problem that exists. If you have never programmed, it will not teach you how. If you have, the book is sufficiently chaotic in its organization, and lacking in rigor, that you will find it difficult to get the information you want. And if once read, the book should be discarded, because it cannot be used as a reference. In an attempt, presumably, to produce a book that is not overly burdensome for a "beginner," descriptions are frequently sloppy and filled with half-truths. The authors would have been much more successful in appealing to the inexperienced reader by significantly reducing the size of the book. Few in the target audience want to start with a 750+ page volume. As an example of the sloppiness I indicated above, the authors go to the trouble to distinguish between "parameters" and "arguments," and then immediately use the terms with exactly the opposite meanings. For the purists among us, there is also a misuse of "less" and "fewer." Finally, there are frequent references to appendices that do not exist. For anyone interested in PHP, I would recommend "Professional PHP Programming" if you want to stay in the Wrox family. Being published in 1999, it lacks the latest information on PHP 4, but it also suffers from none of the flaws in "Beginning PHP 4."
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Summary: Great book
Review: I just bought it from a local retailer, great book. It explains in detail everything that goes on behind the scenes. It also explains the php tags and such very well. This is a great book and I suggest it to anyone who makes a web page. PHP is a great, powerful, and fun language to learn. Next I am gonna get PHP4 Professional (Due out soon, by Wrox Press) and then going to learn some C++.
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Summary: Excellent resource
Review: I just recieved this book today and spent some quality time looking through it. As with most WROX books, the examples are useful, real-world presentations and I was pleasantly surprised to see some screenshots that used Mozilla as well as Internet Explorer, illustrating the truly cross-platform, cross-browser compatibility of the language. Thanks to the WROX team for another outstanding reference, and of course thanks to Rasmus Lerdorf for giving us the best platform-agnostic, HTML-embedded, server-side web scripting language available to date.
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Summary: Good for beginners.
Review: I knew basic HTML and that was it. I've had courses in C++ and VB, so I have some programming background. This book taught me the basics of PHP and MySQL. If you want to make small websites, this book is for you. I personally run a gaming guild website and this book taught me how to make great websites.
If you want to make gigantic websites though, I might choice another book, but if you are just the casual web programmer, get this book.
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Summary: I went from Zero to Expert and this book was a big help
Review: I like this book and highly recommend it. It is good for people who are new to PHP but not so good for people who are new to programming. I've done a lot of programming in other languages and needed to learn PHP in a big hurry for a project that I was about to take on. This book got me up to speed fast. I'm inclined to think that a lot of the negative reviews are from people without any programming background. I agree this book is not the right place to start if you are a non-programmer. I've also done a fair amount of html prior to reading this book, I found that it's html section and php techniques for generating forms was really excellent, I learned some really great things! As far as depth goes, such as discussing details of the functions. Well, that's what the php manual is for (www.php.net). Initially I tried to learn the language from the php manual alone but didn't get very far, I couldn't see the forest because the trees were in the way, eg too much detail without a big picture. What this book does is to focus on the big picture of how and why to do something. It also shows multiple approachs to the same problem and compares them so that you get an idea of the alternatives and trade-offs. Starting from not knowing php to writing some very sophisticated programs... I learned it all with two books and the manual. The other book that I read is PHP Developers Cookbook. The two books are very complimentary, there is not that much overlap between them instead they fill each others gaps. Note that the "Cookbook" is more advanced and assumes that you already know a lot of php. Okay, the one big gripe that I have is their lack of proof reading. They must have really rushed this to press. There are literally hundreds of errors and the errata sheet is incomplete. However it is easy to get past the errors as long as you don't make the assumption that the text is always correct. In other words, if something doesn't make sense then you should be suspicious of an error instead of always assuming that it's your lack of understanding. The necessity of Rewriting the code examples is a little annoying, but the book can hardly be faulted for language changes that were made after the book was published. PHP is a rapidly moving target, no book will ever be current for very long. And besides, the best way to understand a program is to take it apart and rewrite it, that's why they are called "Examples". (most of the changes needed are trivial). Mostly what you need to do is to change $varname to $_REQUEST['varname'] and that will fix it. If you are having trouble finding the correct variable then use phpinfo(); to get a list of all of the available variables, then you just pick what you need from the list and put a $ in front of it.
(...)By the way, the code examples can be downloaded from their website which can save a lot of typing...
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Summary: Great Book for PHP newbies (beginner to intermediate)
Review: I personally found this book a great resource... I created a dynamic page that lists mp3s ( including all info from ID3 tags ) from a flat file database.. and it works great in PHP4 on windows platform... i have never even heard of PHP until two weeks ago, bought this book, read it in two weeks, and learned all i need to know to get a fully functional database going... I am now gonna look at other technology, but recommed this book for anyone who wants to learn PHP. wg
Rating:
Summary: Excellent for the PHP Beginner
Review: I recently purchased this book, and as some of the other reviewers have said, it rarely leaves my desk. I found this book to be written at an ideal level of difficulty for someone with a good working knowledge of HTML, and NOTHING more. This book has helped me develop from a static HTML designer to a capable PHP programmer. The book covers a number of topics that I'd always wanted to use on my sites, including: cookies, sessions, interactive forms, and database connectivity, including an introduction to using SQL to connect to a number of different databases. The book has a number of tutorials and examples which perform the key function of transferring what you are learning into practical examples (often lacking in beginning books). There is also a great appendix of functions that gives the new programmer a reference to which they can refer for quick answers. Finally, and maybe best of all, Wrox has a great Web site with a number of forums related to the topics covered in the book. Overall, it's a great book for beginners. I used what I'd learned in the first week to add a number of dynamic features to my own Web sites, and the difference was instantly noticeable. Best of luck!
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