Rating: 
Summary: I DONT KNOW HOW ANYONE COULD NOT GIVE THIS A 5
Review: The best computer book I have ever read. Easy to follow. It covers PHP inside out. If you want to learn PHP get this book now!
Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: You people are crazy giving this book only 4 stars. To those who complain about the extremely brief function reference: it's better not to include it. Why? Because the book would have been too huge. If you want a good function reference printed out, it would have to be a second book. They did something better: they organized the functions by category and left the alphabetical and example listing to the easy-to-find html version on the web which they apparently assumed the reader would be intelligent enough to save to their hard drive and use "find" in the edit menu when they need the info. It's easier than lugging a book around and many times faster. Just bookmark the PHP reference you should have already saved to your hard drive.The Environment variables listing and web browser compatibility sections were much needed. OK, OK a good function reference would have been nice. But how often are complete ones included? When they are included, they aren't very impressive. A better formatted version than that enormously-space-wasting web function reference would have been nice. It could have replaced the verbose sections that detailed specific PHP applications. Those should have been left out.
Rating:
Summary: Saved my life, and my sanity!
Review: I've read more PHP books, websites, mailing lists and discussion groups than I care to think about in the last few weeks, and NOTHING has come close to this book. For an almost-complete newbie, it is clear, concise, very easy to navigate and - particularly the section on mySQL - has made easy things I just never thought I'd understand. Thank you so much, Wrox!
Rating: 
Summary: Helped me to hit the ground running
Review: Overall, I was very pleased with my purchase of this book. It's reasonably clear & comprehensive, and the tutorial projects illustrated the concepts well. There are many plug-in libraries available for the language, and the book seems to cover them all. I've made good use of the mysql section. The biggest complaint I have about the book is the function reference appendix: Like every other book and the official online docs, this book groups the functions by type - not alphabetically. This may be useful the very first time you encounter the language and you're wondering how comprehensive the language is, but after the first 2 minutes it just gets in the way of finding information on that particular function you read about and are trying to find again. The function reference was also a little frustrating because each function was given one very sparse line of explanation - so it's not really useable. (Alternatively, if it had pointed the reader back to the full explanation in the text, that would've been helpful.) Anyway, function references should be "handy", not "frustrating". Similarly, the HTML tag reference was seductive when I saw it in the bookstore, but it turns out to be just terse enough to be almost useless in practice. I can see why some reviewers thought it was a waste of 60 pages. Just a bit more info on the tags & the clauses, and it really would be a useful perk. But the bottom line is: With much C++ experience, and minimal HTML coding experience, I was able to whip together an impressive skeleton of a complex web-based application in six days. Management had previously thought the app would take a major companywide effort, but instead gave us the go-ahead to develop it further. Soon to be a new product line for the company!
Rating: 
Summary: Muddled but moderately useful
Review: Whilst the authors spend much of the preface thanking their editors, it seems that the editors could have done more. There is much in this book that is poorly written, examples and coding style are inconsistent throughout, and it is completely apparent that different sections have been written by different authors. This is not a book for novice programmers. Although it starts out slowly it quickly ramps up. If you do not have a good grounding in at least one other programming language you will get lost quickly. Neither is this a book particularly suited to professionals, as the title might suggest. The topics and examples seem to be geared towards small and mid-sized web sites. The featured shopping cart program for example is fairly naive - it supports only offline credit card purchases. Much of the book is structured around explaining PHP feature-by-feature. This makes it read like a reference book, but the explanations are liberally illustrated with examples which make it less easy to look things up here than in the official PHP documentation. There is little discussion of high-level concepts, structured programming techniques and architectural considerations, which is a pity - how to design a PHP program for use on the web would be a much more useful topic than the mechanics of using the language itself. That said, this book is not without value - it is certainly worthwhile to get different perspectives on things. This book provides an alternative source of information to the official PHP documentation, and one that is fleshed out with commentary and examples. I did learn things from this book and have referred to it whilst writing programs. Overall, a reasonably useful book but perhaps not worth the rather high price.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Resource
Review: I have been somewhat nervous about buying Wrox books. They, like the O'Reilly books, are not geared for the beginner. This book follows suit, if you are a newbie to web programming or programming in general, this book won't help you get over that hurdle. However, being familiar with programming, I found the book easy to understand. Note, that you will need to know HTML -- this book does NOT cover HTML. I used Medinets books to give myself an introduction and used this behomoth book to fill in the rest. The book offers a comprehensive coverage. Everything from image processing, SQL database connections, and other things are covered. In addition, Fast Templates are covered (albeit not too clearly). I felt the book could have used more examples -- especially early on. This book is an invaluable resource. If you are planning on using PHP, by all means pick up this book and Medinet's book.
Rating:
Summary: very good explanations, great examples
Review: the authors are experienced programmers and try to explain with good examples the principles of programming. php is described very thorough. even short side steps to installation procedures and mysql are made. i think it is best used for the beginner or middle-advanced programmer to get a feel for the php script language. i had no problems with it. the chapters are easy to read and have a lot of examples. i only encountered problems when i wanted to use the downloaded example code. i had to lay my hands on the code. so only 4 stars. the examples in the book are very near to website development reality (database driven shopping baskets, user registrations, etc.) and i like the clear programming style.
Rating:
Summary: Good but lacking.
Review: The main problem with this book is that the authors tried to keep it too "simple". I don't see why they bothered entitling it "Professional", when everytime something of critical purpose would come up they simply refer you else where or say "that is beyond the scope of this book since we are trying to keep it simple". The book does have a few decent examples, but I found leaving out SSL (Secure Socket Layers) in the disscussion of the Shopping Cart application to render the application nearly useless. But it can be used as a good example on how to tier a MySQL database. The other "application" is so focused on the content of the MySQL database, that it doesn't serve as a very good abstract model. Too much babble and not enough focus on what the code is doing. Your milage may vary, but coming from the standpoint of a "professional" I found the book to be lacking on the substance I needed most...
Rating:
Summary: Could NOT put it down!
Review: So glad this was the first book I purchased on PHP. Desperate to get through a few dynamic web site development projects in a hurry (as usual), this book gave me enough information and example code to get the job done without a stitch of frustration. Other books on PHP have been, for me, too watered down, redundant or just plain boring. You will still need to visit the on-line manual for specifics. But this book will get you started in the right direction for every aspect of PHP's use and power. (No longer frustrated with sick, buggy ASP! Yesss! Thank you, Open Source community).
Rating:
Summary: Such a great language - so little documentation
Review: Like the other reviewers I recommend that you know a mainstream programming language before taking on PHP, this is not a cold start language. This is a very helpful book that addresses a lot of issues that come up when programming in PHP and it provides examples where the manual leaves you hanging. The section on security is very helpfull as well. This book does lend itself to being more of a reference than an instruction manual but documentation on PHP is hard to come by so in my opinion anything right now is a help. I would hope this will change but untill then I recommend this as a companion. The experienced PHP progammer may scoff at it but it has pulled me out of several snags that I have run into.
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