Rating: 
Summary: Better then O'Reilly
Review: I requested that my Parents buy me this book over two years ago. Sure I paid them for it but I demanded this book. I'm not quite sure why I did but at the time I was wanting to learn PHP and I was not happy with the way the O'Reilly books were written for Perl (2nd Edition) so I knew that I was not going O'Reilly for learning PHP4. Now that I've had this book and time has passed I would say that I have suggested this book to lots of people and they have all learned PHP alot easier then they would have from O'Reilly books.I say go WNOR, Chris, et al. You all did a good job. I felt like the authors were sitting over my shoulder and giving me a one on one session each time I read the book. The examples were fun, understandable, and had a point them. They also helped me to have a better understanding in Programming in general. The next year, I had a C/C++ programming class and Aced it without a problem. You know, they say 9 out of 10 students fail their first programming class. I wasn't one of those nine thanks to this book.
Rating:
Summary: Great Beginners Book, and excellent for intermediate too
Review: I started PHP programming using another wrox book - Professional PHP Programming, which is also an excellent book. Beginning PHP4 was not a step back as it helped me review what I have been learning and doing for the past half year. Two thumbs up.
Rating: 
Summary: I was stucked at chatper 6
Review: I was having headache when i read the book, that because the examples were all related to MATH . it's no use for building a real website . I feel sick of their explaination with more than pages, and just one example for the whole chapter . If you hate MATH , dont buy this book .
Rating:
Summary: Wanna learn PHP? this is THE book!
Review: I've already know something about PHP, but I wanted to dig deep into this language. I've found this book to be the perfect tool to understand how PHP handles web pages. Even if you don't have any programming experience, you can easily read and understand every chapter: this book is full of examples, most of them are clear and well explained. Maybe just a couple of examples in the middle of the book force you to read them twice, but I still consider it a great book. All you have to know is a bit of HTML.
Rating:
Summary: A Must Have
Review: I've passed by this book by so many times on my trips through my local bookstore and now that I've finally bought it I find myself asking why? Why didn't I check this book out sooner?! Wrox Press's Beginning PHP4 is great. As a beginner myself, I couldn't reccomend this book highly enough for anyone interested in delving into the world of Open-Source server-side scripting. This is a must have for any web developer just starting out with PHP.
Rating: 
Summary: Compound Interest & Calculators
Review: If you want to know all about compound interest and calculators this book is for you. Little real world examples. Do yourself a favor and get PHP Essentials, or at least a book that concentrates on making Web Shopping Sites. The good thing about PHP Essentials is that all lines are commented with reasonably good explainations and it is actually creating something that is useful rather than a compilation of the PHP Manual and stupid clock, finances programs, that have nothing to do with building interactive web sites. Don't buy this book.
Rating:
Summary: It Gets The Job Done, But It's Nothing Special
Review: If you've been programming for a while, the pace of this book is too slow to read cover to cover. The best thing to do is read the first half of the book (through chapter 9) and then skip around to what interests you. As others have mentioned, you will have to modify the code in the examples to get them to work because of the use of globals. This is not impossible to overcome if you write the message board for the book at http://p2p.wrox.com. However, it is annoying. There are other errors too, but it doesn't take much in the way of trial and error to get around them. The three chapters on MySQL are the most useful. If you've worked with databases in other scripting languages, e.g. Perl, Python, or Ruby, it's simply a matter of looking up what you want to do. There are some good style examples on structuring PHP code - use of an "$action" variable to drive the behavior of the site from a single page. The book also stresses putting reusable code in include files. The author dismisses classes/objects as not really being useful in PHP, but the use of classes elimates the need for the "global" declarations in many of the common include files. All in all, this is an adequate book, but noting profound. If you have programming experience, this book will get you up and running quickly.
Rating:
Summary: It Gets The Job Done, But It's Nothing Special
Review: If you've been programming for a while, the pace of this book is too slow to read cover to cover. The best thing to do is read the first half of the book (through chapter 9) and then skip around to what interests you. As others have mentioned, you will have to modify the code in the examples to get them to work because of the use of globals. This is not impossible to overcome if you write the message board for the book at http://p2p.wrox.com. However, it is annoying. There are other errors too, but it doesn't take much in the way of trial and error to get around them. The three chapters on MySQL are the most useful. If you've worked with databases in other scripting languages, e.g. Perl, Python, or Ruby, it's simply a matter of looking up what you want to do. There are some good style examples on structuring PHP code - use of an "$action" variable to drive the behavior of the site from a single page. The book also stresses putting reusable code in include files. The author dismisses classes/objects as not really being useful in PHP, but the use of classes elimates the need for the "global" declarations in many of the common include files. All in all, this is an adequate book, but noting profound. If you have programming experience, this book will get you up and running quickly.
Rating: 
Summary: Needs a Second Edition
Review: It's sad to say that this book is getting a bit out of date. So many of the examples use coding conventions which just don't apply any more. I also found it to have a fairly counter-intuitive approach. Why must we wait until halfway through the book before we see anything about databases? Surely databases are what server-side scripting is about? I came to this book, having been led into PHP by other titles I had read, but I felt - not so much dissapointed - but maybe just a bit dissatisfied. It seems there is no title out there which is sufficiently up to date to show me my next step. Perhaps this publisher is hanging fire until PHP5 comes along, but if they are I must say it's a frustrating wait for the rest of us who have to earn our living doing this stuff. Maybe I should try their Professional title?
Rating:
Summary: Poor examples
Review: Like one of the other reviewers, I recommend PHP Essentials instead. PHP Essentials gets you right into doing neat things without getting you bogged down for days and weeks in variable definitions, type casting, and other obscure things. I also found the examples after the beginning chapters were too complex to figure out what was going on. Having said that, I do like to have two books when studying a language so that I can use one as a reference. When I find something unclear in the main book I am studying, or want some nitty gritty detail not covered, I can look it up in the other book. In that regard, I find Beginning PHP4 very useful. One last thing to note: Wrox has a website with discussion forums for each of their books, which in theory is a great idea. You can go to those forums and discuss specific problems you are having relating to your book. Once again, a fantastic idea. However, in practice it is a failure. The forums themselves are poorly created, so mechanically they don't work well, which is really somewhat hard to believe, since there are free php forums at www.devshed.com and www.wsabstract.com that are technical wonders. Furthermore, I found answers to posts at the Wrox Beginning PHP4 forum are not forthcoming, which is probably due to the poor mechanics.
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