Rating: 
Summary: Great Resource
Review: This is a fantastic book. It talks the reader through installation and configuration in a very effective manner, this has been a stopping block to many of the open-source books that I've read. Although, I would like another page or two explaining how Apache does some of the things it does...but, I guess that is the job of an apache book, not of this already meaty 850 page book. The book is also has a good balance that fits very neatly between the "for dummies" and the "nutshell" books.
Rating: 
Summary: Not for the php beginner
Review: As a reference manual, "Profession php Programming" has some utility. The 880 pages contain a lot of references to specific php staements, data types, operators and functions. As a demonstration certain programming techniques, it's not bad, either; the bulk of the text follows the creation of pages involving e-mail, LDAP, XML, SQL, shopping carts and other popular web applications. You certainly can't faul it for completeness. But as a tutorial for the php beginner, it's rather lacking, unless you're willing to slog through all 880 pages to learn by example. I think this book is a case of too many cooks; there are five seperate authors, and it shows. The overall organization is confused and inconsistant, and the graphic layout of the book is a mess. There's an awful lot of information here- finding it is the problem. If you have a specific interest in the topics mention above, and you'd like to see some well-documented examples of how to implement them, you may find this book useful. But if you're a newcomer to php, look elsewhere.
Rating: 
Summary: This book needed an editor.
Review: This book might be worthwhile as a classroom workbook where you go through each and every chapter in order. As a book for somebody who wants to get things done this book is terrible. You have to wade through entire chapters to find what you want and the index is useless. For my real world projects I have never found what I wanted to know in this book. You are better off just looking at online documentation. It is also out of date and lacks coverage of sessions (there is a newer edition of the book that might include this but I am not going to buy it).
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: Good insight, many holes
Review: I bought this book to supplement a graduate class in which we were researching a solution for an online automobile insurance application. We compared C++, PERL, ASP, JSP, and PHP. If you have programmed with another language, I would recommend this book. The syntax of loops, ifs, and case statements was covered. The object-oriented model of PHP was also expained. The book covered the two subjects I was primarily concerned with: databases and LDAP. These subjects are treated with vague explanations and some examples. I thought the examples were a bit skimpy and hard to follow. Some people have recommended using the online documentation. I would recommend buying this book to get a good foundation of PHP. Then, buy the PHP developer's cookbook to find solutions to problems you encounter. The online documentation is good as a reference manual. This book is good for some reference, but mostly to read from beginning to end in order to uncover the power of PHP. Once you understand the principles behind PHP, you can scour the web and the "Cookbook" for specific code for the solution you have devised within the limitations of PHP.
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