Rating: 
Summary: Who this book is for.
Review: This book is for people who are expeirenced with PHP and who wish to refine/extend their applications development skills (hence the title). As such, it is suited to web designers who have migrated to programming but who have no real formal programming background. I highly recomend this book because it provides the right guidence to turn you into a real "professional" web "programmer". So this book is a MUST if you have no formal programming training. I think that you need to be better than intermediate at PHP itself to understand ALL of it but it would still be useful for people who have already (but only) had a beginner's introduction. Many of the discoveries in this book are quite profound (particularly with regards to how PHP implements structures such as arrays and objects) but it can be tough to read/comprehend if you're not really interested in the finer points. The author _does_ demonstrate how the finer points affect real-world implementations. The nature of the [advanced] topics means discussing wider topics like XML are important and I think the author has approached this very well. I found the session management part of this book by itself worth the purchace price. The only part of the book I didn't bother to read was the last chapter on writing your own PHP modules since I'm not a C programmer, however this may change.
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Summary: first and best
Review: this book is the first book especially for php4 and it's the best php-book overall!
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Summary: The best
Review: This book is written by two php advanced programmers with great skills and technique. People from the PHP and the Zend team have helped and others also. This book gives you all the tips and technique for advanced programming using php4. It has real world examples which are also very well explained. It definetly is worth buying
Rating: 
Summary: Not for the experienced programmer
Review: This book seems to concentrate more on program writing concepts than it does on actual PHP. Your could get more code examples from reading the online help. Actual PHP explaination and concepts aren't actually presented until the 6th or 7th chapter(more than halfway). There is not a PHP command reference anywhere in the book. I have bought the PHP Essentials book in an effort to obtain a reference.
Rating: 
Summary: For Novice Programmers Only
Review: This book wastes alot of time teaching you how to program and organize a project. That's all good and fine, but belongs in a different book. If your a novice programmer you will like it. If you're an experienced programmer, find another book on PHP. The end of the book is full of the Zend API. Anyone who is advanced enought to get into the Zend API doesn't need this book.
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Summary: Should become a classic
Review: This is an excellent guide to PHP 4 and includes some excellent material on things like security, performance and database work which should be required reading for anyone building a site no matter which language they're using.
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Summary: A definte addition to your PHP technical library
Review: This was an excellent book. There is a wealth of information here for anyone who is trying to develop enterprise level web applications. The book definitely is geared towards PHP4 and the Zend engine, but there is information on how some of the techniques and code can be applied to PHP3. The writing style was easy. The technical discussions were thorough and the topics were covered in a logical order. This book is definitely for the advanced or serious developer. There is a lot information on software development practices, designing applications and advanced PHP coding techniques. If you do any serious development with PHP and especially if you're looking to utilize version 4.0, this is definitely a book for your technical library.
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Summary: Wide but shallow.
Review: When I first heard about this book on the authors web site (phpwizard.net), I was looking forward reading it. Based on the table of contents posted on their site, it looked like this was finally going to be a solid book about php. This book gives a wide overview of php, but is far from being an in-depth guide. To adequately cover all of the topics in this book, it would need to be 2-3 times longer. The authors claim this book is for "experienced developers", but still feel the need to cover such "advanced" topics as how to indent your code and choose variable names. The examples included in the book are weak, and not very detailed. There is one long, well explained example, but unfortunately it covers creating a web to IRC gateway with PHP - which is a neat hack, but not very relevant to the types of problems typically encountered when developing web applications with PHP (it would have been much better to feature a full blown shopping cart, or some other typical web app). There are a lot of good examples and documentation on phplib, but since good documentation on phplib is already available on the web, it's not very useful (phplib is also based on the old php 3.0, so it's strange to see so much of a book on php 4.0 dedicated to it). The book also includes a series of useless "case studies" which have absolutely no relevance to php development (besides, there are plenty of case studies on zend.com). The pages used for the case studies would have been better used to present more examples, and more detail. Overall, I think the authors had a good idea here (and it's obvious they know what they are talking about), it was just poorly executed. This book cannot be recommended to absolute beginners or experienced developers. If, however, you know PHP, but are weak in general programming practices (choosing varible names, commenting your code, security, etc) you will probably get a lot out of this book.
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Summary: Third PHP book.
Review: When I got this book, I was quite familiar with the language, so syntax and learning php wasn't really what my purpose was. It has been emphasized repeatedly in online reviews, as well as within this book that it is not for the novice programmer This book aims to help you better understand project management and how to design your web based applications. Let me give a really small example. I wrote a web based mail program for some clients, and 3 programmers and myself spent about 4 weeks on the project. It was well done, no problems, and our clients were happy. After reading this book, I can think of 20 different ways of making that program better. Again, this isn't meant for the novice programmer, but experienced programmers / project managers looking to expand their php horizons should pick up a copy.
Rating: 
Summary: VERY GOOD BOOK
Review: When I say 4 stars, read 4.5 stars. The authors are well known and respected in the PHP community. Much good info here. Let me say this: A Web Developer in the US, making $75,000/year, makes $35 per hour. I think it's a sure thing that you can read this book and save yourself at least a hour's work on your next project, so it is a good investment in that regard. I only found 1 actual error: In the PHP Normal Form example in chapter 5, the function is_numeric() already belongs to PHP. I don't know how the authors didn't catch this before publication, but it's not a big deal. Simply renaming the function fixes this error. Excellent book overall.
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