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Summary: Should be on every PHP Developers Bookshelf
Review: A few years ago, I gave up on PHP because the books available were so terrible. When PHP4 came out, I decided to revisit both the scripting language and the available resources.First, the excellent Wrox books came out, and now PHP Cookbook, another excellent resource for PHP programmers. The code snippets are useful on their own, and the coverage of the language is very good. I find myself turning to it even to look up basic function calls, because the use of the function often points out approaches (and additional functionality) that I wasn't aware of. The book and code samples are well-written, my only complaint is that the source code for the recipes aren't available.
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Summary: NO CD provided for code and examples
Review: Any coder loves to cut & paste rather than type in the code from the book. It is really a shame that this book has some good examples but they apparently force you to type in the examples by hand. NO CD and as far as I can tell, no website to download from. If you want to read examples then this is your book, if you want to try the examples then find another book with a CD or website support.
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Summary: Finally, a PERL Cookbook for PHP
Review: Becoming more advanced in the field of PHP programming, I needed a solid reference to help me along the way. This book did just the trick. It gives problems and solutions to everyday problems that programmers face, and conveniently groups the examples by category, such as strings, arrays, etc. PHP Developer's Cookbook helped me with many of the tasks that I was currently embarking upon, and looking through its contents helped me find new and better solutions for current and future problems. A word of warning, however, this book will probably NOT teach you PHP. The categories are not placed in a good order for beginners, but are great for those of intermediate and expert programmers alike. If you are new to PHP, I would say look elsewhere, say PHP Essentials, but I would recommend that you definetely keep this text in mind if you decide to further your PHP skills. Strongly recommended for intermediate and expert PHP programmers.
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Summary: Incomplete
Review: Bought this book hoping it would be similar to the Perl cookbook - as another reviewer commented, there are "gaps" in the content. Every time I needed a solution to a particular problem in Perl, I found the answer in the Perl cookbook. Every time I needed a similar solution in PHP, I found myself using [their wedsite] because the PHP Cookbook made no mention of the problem. Hopefully there are better PHP books out there - I think I'll stick to [the website] for now and get free, detailed help from the PHP community.
Rating:
Summary: Incomplete
Review: Bought this book hoping it would be similar to the Perl cookbook - as another reviewer commented, there are "gaps" in the content. Every time I needed a solution to a particular problem in Perl, I found the answer in the Perl cookbook. Every time I needed a similar solution in PHP, I found myself using [their wedsite] because the PHP Cookbook made no mention of the problem. Hopefully there are better PHP books out there - I think I'll stick to [the website] for now and get free, detailed help from the PHP community.
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Summary: Rocks
Review: For anyone who learns by doing rather than memorising methods and functions, this is the book for you. I have read the Wrox Professionals, PHP Bible, Core and New Riders books but this is by far the best. Once you know the syntax of the language ..., you need a book which can show you examples of usage. I found myself revisiting a lot of my code after reading this book and changing the way I had done things.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Good for the intermediate programmer. This book is *not* a HOWTO or an introductory text. Instead the book lists common problems broken down by functionality and provides solutions and explanations to the problems. If you can't find a solution in there, it certainly provides an excellent place to look. I've always found the 'Cook Book' type programming books an excellent source of inspiration, and this book is no exception.
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Summary: PHP gets a Perl Cookbook
Review: Have any of you done Perl and worn the Perl Cookbook cover off? Then this is your book.
The layout and general concept of this book is very similar to that other beloved cookbook. Some entries are nearly identical. One feature I adore in particular is multiple recipes for one task, stating which is faster/more efficient, and then telling you why. I have been scripting PHP for 2 years, mostly professionally, but many fun, personal projects as well. Not only do I wish I had this book, but I am gald that I have it now. I have been reading this thing randomly but voraciously, and I have found little gems even under the elementary topics. I will be working on 2 major projects soon, the development stage of one has just begun. One is a massive intranet site, (authentication, sessions, customization, etc.) and the other is an ecommerce site/application. I will be using this book continuously as a: 1) code reminder 2) how-to resource 3) code-refiner 4) style-refiner. I've already used it several times for custom classes - don't pass this one up!
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Summary: Sterling dug deep for these ingredients!
Review: Having used PHP for about 2 years now, I was fairly comfortable with the language and originally bought the book because I saw Sterling at the PHP Conference and liked his attitude so I thought I'd buy his book. The approach of this book is far different from most of those lofty, heady books with their $foo after $foobar examples of basically useless coding ideas. Sterling takes real life needs and cooks them up with short, useable snippets of code. He says in the opening that, "This book is meant [to used over and over as a daily reference for problem solving]." Well, Sterling, you hit the mark. Another nice thing was that I started finding functions that I didn't even know existed and then started imagining uses for them to solve problems I hadn't thought of as problems! There is only one shortcoming to this book (with the exception of Julie Meloni becoming Julie "Melon" in the opening section :P), the lack of source code availability. If you want to see the samples in action and play with them, start typing. That's not too bad for most of the 10-30 line snippets, but for things like the basic search-engine code, it's quite tedious. I OCR'd it... but not everyone has that ability. Hopefully SAMS will either get him a CD to include in his book next time or set up some web space for us to grab it.
Rating: 
Summary: Very useful, but there are frustrating gaps
Review: I agree that this book is a worthwhile purchase for any serious PHP developer - it offers a wealth of useful ideas and immediately became the most used resource on my PHP bookshelf. But there are a couple of weaknesses that other reviews have not touched on. The main disappointment is the choice of topics coverered - there are some pretty major omissions. As others point out, this is not a book for beginners - a fair bit of knowledge is assumed. Yet much space is taken up with very basic topics which are well covered in the introductory texts, such as creating a class or opening a file. While this has the virtue of completeness, it has reduced the space for detailed coverage of the really tough issues that are beyond the scope of the PHP introductions. Of the more advanced topics, I particularly liked the database API - this is the most elegant and efficient solution I have seen, and is worth the price on its own. And there is plenty of detail on email handling, socket programming and XML. But other key topics such as form handling, data validation and user authentication are barely touched on. Given that the built-in facilities for error handling are still poor in PHP4, I was particularly disappointed that this issue is not really addressed. Another weakness is the rather superficial coverage of the challenges of building usable and efficient search facilities. My other concern is the rather condensed coding style. Comments are pretty thin on the ground, and the local variable names are often cryptic. So you sometimes have to work quite hard to understand what is going on. Overall, a great contribution to the PHP literature, but not as comprehensive as it might be. Perhaps this could be addressed in the second edition??
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