Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL: From Novice to Professional :

Rating:
Summary: very well written and informative
Review: Sometimes when I read books to learn new languages I feel like I have to know the language before I even read the book. Not so with Gilmore's text. Gilmore gives the reader a real sense that a person is sitting there beside them teaching them how to code in php.

If you want to learn php and mysql then my opinion is that Gilmore's book is your best bet.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent resource
Review: This book was an excellent introduction to PHP 5. Coming from a J2EE background, Gilmore's precise and detailed explanations helped me understand what PHP 5 had to offer, engineer to engineer. Gilmore's book assumes that you're intelligent, and that you're interested in the details. He then explains those details in depths. All in all, an excellent book.

Rating:
Summary: A great learning guide
Review: Within weeks of buying this book, I found that my copy rapidly become well worn from use. To me, that's a great indication of how useful and well-written a technical book is. The author's explantions are clear and to the point and the plentiful examples and code snippets really help illustrate the various concepts throughout the book. For me, I like getting my hands 'dirty' by playing with the example code because I find that I learn better that way. When I ran into a problem on an example that I was working on, I emailed the author with a few questions and he responded very quickly and was extremely helpful with suggestions and advice with which I was able to resolve my problem. I highly recommend this book for anyone trying to learn PHP and MySQL.