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Rating: 
Summary: excellent practical guide
Review: Dispite some minor discrepencies pointed out by another reviewer, the information in this book is very useful. If you want to build complex database web applications with PHP, then Postgres is the right RDBMS to use and this book is the right book to guide you. Well worth the money.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for beginners but flawed.
Review: I knew nothing about PHP or SQL before getting this book and I have had little programming experience. I found it pretty well suited to my needs. O'Reilly's Programming PHP on the other hand was too advanced and not written as a beginners text. I did find the O'Reilly book useful however as the PHP and PostgreSQL.... has a lot of coding errors that are very confusing. Hopefully these will be dealt with in the second edition. While I have some problems with the book I think there isn't a good alternative for someone at my level.
Rating: 
Summary: One star is too many: don't buy this book.
Review: It's hard to argue than any book has absolutely zero value: even the world's worst book (and this one may be in the running) probably contains some useful information. However, in a worthwhile book, I expect to find a good deal of useful information, and more than that, I expect not to find false information. There are enough errors in the first 60 pages of this book that I am not going to bother reading the rest of it.Example: p. 50 shows this code segment $a=23;
$b=34;
if ($a > $b)
{
echo 'a is higher than b';
}
else
{
echo 'b is higher than a';
}
?> The merest child, although evidently not SAMS technical editors, can see the elementary error here, which occurs when $a = $b. Example: p. 53 shows this code segment $a=18;
$b=19;
if ($a xor $b)
{
echo '$a and $b are the same';
}
else
{
echo '$a and $b are not the same';
}
?> with the comment that the code will return "$a and $b are not the same". If the author's earlier comment, that "False is returned if both values are the same", is correct, then this is obviously backwards, but beyond that, what is the basis of the comparison? In other languages I'm familiar with, XOR compares two Boolean values, or possibly performs a bitwise comparison on byte values. Are the authors telling us that in PHP XOR performs the same function as the inequality operator? Or is it that in PHP even numbers are True and odd numbers are False? Or what? The most likely explanation is that this example is simply garbage, and I strongly suspect that the rest of the book, which I no longer intend to read, is the same. I don't know much about PHP, which is why I bought the book, but I know enough about other programming languages to know that I can't have any faith in what this book tells me.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing.
Review: The first thing that you will notice about this book is that it is littered with coding, grammatical and spelling errors. So much so that after a while you will begin to lose all respect for the writers. Not a good start. Next, you will realise that the content in this book is quite random. It is apparently "outside of the scope of the book" to discuss very useful string maniplution functions such as "strtr" and "strstr" (& others). Similarly the writer assumes that the code: if ($a)
is logically equivalent to:
if (isset($a))
which is just plain wrong (Page 54 & others). This could mislead readers into writing buggy PHP. Furthermore, the language used is so childish that one must wonder how it was ever published. Often-used superlatives such as "countless," "endless," etc. are very frustrating to read and not even technically accurate in most cases. It is difficult to find concrete examples, but I can guarantee that you will begin to skim-read most of the content in this book to avoid the writers' inaccurate, childish words. Readers new to databases and coding will find this book a confusing read. Quite complex ideas such as 'function overloading' are somewhat assumed knowledge. On the contrary, very simple concepts such as if/else statements are discussed in inordinate amounts of detail. Readers experienced with other databases and programming languages will find this book frustrating. The concepts that are covered in detail are generally very simple ones. The more complex ideas discussed in this book are rarely explored in any useful amount of detail. I still, however, gave this book 2 stars. Some of the content is covered well and I did learn a few useful tricks here & there. It is also quite useful as a reference tool (the index isn't bad) - but beware of the coding errors!
Rating:
Summary: No fluff. Jam-packed cover to cover!
Review: There are few books in the technical world that can deliver so much bang for buck. G & S have done a fantastic job letting the world understand the power, performance, and effectiveness of PostgreSQL when paired with a fundamental scripting language like PHP. One of the scarcely covered topics in the book however is *where* to go for hosting once you've conquered PostgreSQL and PHP. Few hosting providers support PostgreSQL as their core offering. One of the few knowledged providers of web hosting services that I've come across is pgHoster... Many books cover too much history and background and skim the surface of topics. This book on the other hand takes a comprehensive dive into each topic one by one chapter by chapter so that you are left with no nook or cranny unsearched. The structure of the book is also well planned with a intuitive flow of thought. Rather than getting the audience installing the database at the beginning, you are first taught the fundamentals of PHP as well as it's idiosyncrasies. The bottom line? Buy this book if you want to get down and dirty with two fantastic open source technologies. A+ to Geschwinde and Schoenig!
Rating:
Summary: Great Resource
Review: Very well laid out, well written, contains all information needed to make your PostGreSQL and PHP project a success.
Rating: 
Summary: Get it Second
Review: While the book was obviously written by people whose first language is not English, and everything is not in it, it is excellent for extending the use of PostgreSQL and PHP. It may not be as approachable as the the Williams and Lane, Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL,O'Reilly, 2002, it is comparable for those who want to use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL. The beginning stuff including string manipulation belongs in other books. For what the book promises, in my opinion it delivers. It is not a beginning PostgreSQL or PHP text, nor should it be.
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