Rating: 
Summary: Not Great, but Still Use
Review: As someone that reads computer books, you have probably read a *lot* of disappointing ones while holding onto an ideal the Perfect Computer Book. Unfortunately, this book would more likely be classified as the former. It is quite bloated, including even a section on HTML in the back. This is more of a reference than a tutorial, although falls shorts to being an ideal reference. It does, however, include quite a bit of information and can often be helpful. I periodically find myself looking up stuff on this book while doing PHP programming.If this was the only PHP book on the market, you wouldn't be bad off with this book. However, there has to be better books out there, so I would recommend that your search for a PHP programming book does not stop with this book. As for other options, I consider _PHP Essentials_ by Julie C. Meloni an extremely good book, except that it lacks information with templates, which I consider a major flaw. Although I still like using books for PHP programming, PHP's website, php.net, is a very essential resource while programming.
Rating: 
Summary: For the last time, this is a must-have!
Review: ... Anyways, I bought this book because I urgently wanted to learn PHP and use it with mysql for a web site, and it was great. You learn the syntax of PHP, and then there are a variety of tutorials on the different capabilties of PHP, including database and image editing (this is actually really cool). Then at the end there are 4 sample full-blown programs that are explained and available for download at the book's website (as well as all the source code throughout the book). These include a web forum script, a send mail script, etc. As great as this book is, I wouldn't recommend it to someone with no programming experience though since the explanations are very concise and thus brief. But anyways, one should not learn PHP as a first language as it is very limited to web uses unlike other scripting languages such as Python.
Rating:
Summary: Nice introduction but not very useful as a reference
Review: This book gives a nice overview of PHP and a few very useful real-world examples in the last chapter. The problem is, however, that once you start writing PHP code you need to look up certain functions and you won't find them all in the book (Perl style regular expression functions, for example)...Therefore, although it serves as a good introduction into the subject, there are other - less expensive - books out there for this purpose.
Rating: 
Summary: Great For Developers With Previous Experience
Review: I purchased this book for a graduate class in which we were researching several server-side solutions for an online automobile insurance program. Fortunately, I had several years of experience in JAVA. I would not recommend this book to anyone who has never programmed using some object-oriented language. However, if you have previous experience in OO programing, then I would recommend this to any developer of PHP solutions. This book gave me the power to research some complex functionality that was necessary for my project. The book is not full of clues and solutions for every problem you may encounter (such as the PHP Developer's Cookbook). However, the book gives you a more powerful tool--the principles by which PHP functions. This book is directed at programmers and is a solid reference manual for PHP developed solutions.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, clearly written
Review: Excellent and clearly written book! I read it and I was able to concoct a decent looking web application using Oracle in a week! This book was written with PHP3 in mind and should be updated with the tricks like start_session, session_register, foreach and alike, but altogether, it's an excellent introductory text, especially if you have a C++ experience. Authors did a great job and I can only recommend the book.
Rating:
Summary: PHP not quite for beginners but...
Review: Okay - let's start by criticizing the bad parts. In my opinion at least, this book does not neccessarily cover good programming practices. I.e - html and php code are frequently mixed up in the same programs, which is usually not a good idea if you want to keep your logic separated from your design. It's almost always a good idea to have html separated from logic since you can much more easily change the design (using your favorite web-editor, which most probably won't understand PHP and will report constant errors in your code). Also, I think the book focuses too much on MySQL as the backend database. I know that mysql is very popular and does a great job in many circumstances, but the reason why I got this book was to learn PHP, not Mysql. I really needed a couple of more references and programming examples when you need to use PHP against other Databases, which in my case is Oracle 8i. This was my first book for PHP, a language I almost stumbled into by accident after spending lots and lots of time trying to figure out Microsoft's (in my view) arcane and difficult coding methods for .ASP and .NET. Not so with PHP! It's easy and quickly learned - and this book really enhanced my experience, touching on many subjects that I had problems grasping when learning from various disconnected tutorials lying around the web. It starts by showing you how to integrate PHP directly into your HTML, which, as I said, might be good for small one or two-page apps (and is also by many considered to PHP's greatest strength, but not really great if you need to write more of a web *application* per se. It also really covers arrays and functions in a good way, plus provides a good many (lengthy!) examples as the conclusion of the book. I think the inclusion of a couple of the appendixes might have been omitted and thus made the book a bit more "quick and easy". Especially Wrox's "ultimate HTML reference", which really doesn't belong in a PHP book. Get O'reilly's HTML Pocket Reference instead. One last bad point - I think a lot of the programming logic is just thrown at the user without really explaining all the nitty-gritty detail. So, this book is probably not for beginners. In conclusion - if you've touched on the language before, get this book. If you haven't, read something like "Learning PHP4" first. This book covers a lot of ground, and it's 909 pages long, so be ready to use quite some time to digest it all. That said, it serves greatly as a reference when you've read it through, and is now a permanent desktop-sitter on my desk.
Rating: 
Summary: Too many holes
Review: While some of this book was helpful as a tutorial for someone new to PHP, there are far too many holes in the book and it is lousy as a reference manual. The index is terrible. To me a book like this must have a strong index or else it is useless. For example, I am working on a project that needs to determine the current date - a fairly common requirement. However, there is no entry in the index for dates or the PHP function getdate! I found the answer at the PHP website but that is what I bought this book for. This is just one example of the poor documentation in this book. There must be better ones.
Rating:
Summary: Get this and the PHP 4 Bible
Review: Of all the PHP books I've seen, this one and the IDG "PHP 4 Bible". This one's more "dense", in that sort of Wroxy kind of British way. Both are fine choices.
Rating:
Summary: Good book
Review: This book has some really good examples and for someone who learns through examples its excellent. The website has a copy of all the sourcecode of the book so you can easily download it and try it out. Its good to have a server with PHP installed or to install PHP yourself as the book goes through that too. Its a really good book if you want to learn PHP properly and not just very quickly.
Rating:
Summary: Clearly, a book for beginners. Get the online docs.
Review: As an experienced programmer, I found this book really frustrating. While it covers lots of other web-related subjects like SQL, LDAP, XML, etc., there's *no* reference manual, and no formal description of the language. If you have a very precise question (e.g.: how do you pass arguments by reference), you have to look at all the examples. Well, some useful information can be found, but you really have to look hard. What's more, the indexing is a joke. No, the title is a con. This is not a book for professionals. A more appropriate title would have been: "Building Web-Enabled Applications for Beginners" or something like that. It's not a bad book per se, but it is aimed at beginners and the title and the publisher's description fooled me into buying it. Experienced developers, stay away from this book!
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