Rating: 
Summary: great book for beginners
Review: for the internet development beginner, this book is ideal. it opens with a historical background of php, a tutorial on developing a php server and then a review of html. such a beginning is unpretencious and informative for the inexperienced developer. the php tutorial is informative, clear and covers all of the basics in a well approached progression. i was able to go through the lessons in the book quickly. meloni's explinations and examples were fantastic. the author always answered my questions during in her explinations. this is a great book for someone, like myself, who has minimal experience in web development. i'd recommend this to anyone who is at the beginning of their web development career or education, working with developers using php or have any interest in learning the basics of web developement for personal or professional use.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent First PHP Book
Review: Either of Julie Meloni's PHP books (PHP Essentials and PHP Fast and Easy) are great books to begin with for those who want to learn about PHP and MySQL. Julie teaches by example with simple scripts that build upon what was learned in those before it. The accompanying web site is very good, which I find essential for any programming book as there are likely to be bug fixes needed and updates posted. While her two books cover much of the same territory they use (mostly) different script examples so I found both of them to be worth having. The more examples I can see of working code, the better I can understand it. I will buy any other books that Julie writes.
Rating:
Summary: PHP From Beginners to Programmers
Review: This book is just what you need if you want to know PHP and you just don't know where to begin, the begin would be here, with this book you can introduce yourself to the PHP Enviroment and so on to the gratest world of Programming, this book covers from basics to advanced programming, but what this book also has is that the content is not based on nothing, wich means that the book is 100% based on life projects just as Encryption of data used in E-Commerce, useful USER TRACKIN' and many other things.
Rating: 
Summary: Great concepts, bad examples
Review: Honestly the book tells the truth about php among other things. You'll get the know-how on making a web server and compiling php with it. Most of the examples work, about 4 don't work at all. This is geared to someone that already knows a lot about unix / linux.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Book
Review: Easy to read. Good place to start but it would help if I had had a little programming knowledge first. I also bought Wrox Biginning PHP and it is a little more informative but has some typo's and some of the example code doesn't work. But it is good for the most part. I am going to backup and establish myself with a beginners C programming book so I can better understand programming.
Rating:
Summary: A Great PHP Book and Reference
Review: PHP Essentials was just what I needed. I was shopping for my first PHP book, having some programming experience in Perl behind me. This book starts out well, slowly introducing the reader to PHP and a refresher on HTML and web forms (so that you can use them to interact with PHP). Then, the book progresses into the language in a logical, organized manner. Just about everything I bought the book for was covered -- connecting to databases, specifically mySQL though the book lists how to interact with about 10 other types, interacting with databases, building a shopping cart system, session management, etc. Even as a reference, the book is great. It has a full appendix which is a great reference for useful functions, each one has its own description. When I needed to build an application I would normally do in Perl, I went to PHP Essentials and found everything I needed in there, even things that I didn't expect to find. Overall, a great book.
Rating:
Summary: Good for Beginners, but not a complete guide
Review: This book has an easy reading structure, but its quite strange that they try to make it "easy" from the beginning, but afterwards they jump straight to building SQL tables, etc. When the main idea was to teach you the PHP primers. Woudnt recommend this book much if you really want to know what PHP is from the beginning, and knowing that afterwards it wont get deep enough in to the field.
Rating:
Summary: Lacks Substance -- Has Cool Examples
Review: This book was helpful to get a few cool PHP scripts running. The examples are fun since they deal mainly with database driven web pages. After I went through the examples I found this books major flaw. It's a bad reference. This book is neither deep nor wide. Instead, it's fun for a few hours / days. If you are only interested in a quick introduction to PHP with some cool examples, then you should consider this book. But if you plan to do serious work with PHP you will need a good PHP reference book as this title will leave you hungry for more.
Rating: 
Summary: PHP Expendables ...
Review: The only persons who may consider to get this book are people with no programming experience. They should not. This book does not provide an extensive view of what PHP is about, and is not didactic enough to be considered as a primer. And it is sadly outdated.Even if the differences between PHP version 3 and 4 are not numerous nor extensive, you could find yourself disappointed. ....
Rating:
Summary: Good for using PHP for web development
Review: Who says that a book has to have 1000+ pages to be of any use. PHP Essentials has shown that it is not so. In just over 300 pages, the author has given everything that one needs to know about PHP to start working on it and develop a full fledge web-based application. This book is great for a new user who has never used server side scripting and also for intermediate user though the first four chapters may prove too basic for them. After that its all about web-based application development starting from database setup, user authentication and progressing towards session management and database management through web. The example codes given in every chapter are explained very clearly. A complex problem is broken down into simpler problems. For each simple problem a PHP solution is given and at the end, all the parts are combined with HTML to come up with the actual code for implementation. PHP is used for various purpose on the Web and 'PHP Essentials' does a great job of covering the web application development. Do not take this book as a guide to learning all PHP features, because it doesn't, although the name is misleading.
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