Rating: 
Summary: More like 2.5 stars
Review: It took a lot of my time to read and understand, most of the examples in the book are pretty much useless, you won't often need to know at all. Even though "PHP essentials" is slightly outdated, it presented with useful examples, I can finish that book in a day or two, very easy reading. Moreover, it doesn't cost any money at all if read it online, I bought it on sale for 4 bucks. The best way to learn is by studying and actually doing examples. the black book is served more like a reference book to me.
Rating: 
Summary: Definitely not the book for me
Review: This book belongs in the bargain shelf, which is where I found it recently at the local Borders. I paid ... for it brand new, drastically reduced from ....The largest problems I had were: missing example code, incorrect code, missing critical information, and too much author ballyhooing. Also, the included CD did not work, it was corrupt. In numerous instances, the author builds from one concept to the next, adding in more complex capabiilites. Unfortunately, the author often fails to provide the complete resultant code, leaving the reader to attempt at guessing at the correct code. Case in point...page 347...no print function is given. Thus the preceding code examples are useless if you do not have the experience to figure it out, which I didn't. Incorrect code...some of the stuff that is in here is just plain wrong. Copied verbatim from the pages, the code just flat out does not work. Missing Information: The chapters explain about 75% of what you need to know to be successful. Missing info, for example, in the email and form sections makes the chapters incomprehensible. There is nothing to bring them together to use forms and emailing together. I had to go online to get these concepts and required code and config changes to make it work. Lastly, the author spends a lot of time making jokes, which is fine, if your work is absolutely complete and accurate. The humor becomes more droll as the mistakes and errors pile up. Lastly, Coriolis is apparently no longer in business. When I found out the CD was corrupt, I immediately emailed the "email address" in the book for assistance, possibly to get a new CD. In short order I got an email error message back stating the email address ... did not exist. I then browsed to ... Nothing. After a Google search on "Coriolis Group", I finally found the news that this company no longer exists, and is now under the control of some cheezy-named publishing company, supposedly the original two guys are now back in charge. I don't know the gory details about the company politics, but their "new" website is beyond boring, and offered no help for us trying to make heads nor tails over this book. To make a long story short, don't buy this book. There are too many other great resources out there.
Rating:
Summary: Much Ado about PHP Black Book
Review: This is not a very well-organized book. The examples are generally over-simplified. My biggest complaint, however, is with the cd rom - it includes "Source Code" from the examples in the book. The source code is merely all of the snippets of code in each chapter jammed into a few html pages. For example chapter 17, "Objects" has several "Example" pages which do not work because objects are illegally redefined several times within the same page. The author does spell it all out in the chapter, but the examples are simply not usable.
| 
