You'll want to graduate onto other texts after you've absorbed this material and I recommend Lerdorf & Tatroe, Programming PHP - but that's because the lucid presentation of this book gave me the encouragement to find out more.

Some other reviewers have missed the point about learning PHP from this book. Firstly it requires effort, and secondly you are far better off trying a basic installation on a scratch PC on your desk than trying out scripts on an ISP account.

Where this book scores highly for me is that for both PHP and MySQL it answers my questions on "How would you do that?" or "How do other guys solve that kind of problem?", which is quite rare in a single book.


Beginner to Intermediate   December 4, 2004
This is an excellent book if you already know something about PHP and MYSQL and want to look for something that would give you more confidence in building interactive websites. The author of the book is very knowledgeable and use many technical terms, and some later advanced chapters may require some thoughts. If you're a complete beginner, then it might take some time to get used to the book.
The examples included in the book include many useful features, such as forums, membership site, content management system, etc... even running creating an ecommmerce site (though it won't be very pretty)


A good book, but some confusing chapters towards the end...   September 19, 2004
 1 out of 2 found this review helpful

To start with, this book is great. I already have some knowledge of HTML and scripting so I was able to go through the early chapters at speed. It provides a good working knowledge of PHP and is also a useful reference for when you are building MySQL databases. Unfortunately the book also has some bad points. As you can see above, the book is written by two authors so the design and layout of the example code changes in the later chapters (chapters 24 onwards) because of the different author. She is not so good. The examples codes are confusing to read because of the large number of 'include' files required by each page. I do realise the importance of designing pages in this way on larger sites, but this just makes it much harder when you are trying to learn PHP. Badly naming the page variables and completely leaving out the coding for the input pages are some of the other tricks she uses to ensure that you have to read each page again slowly and rely too heavily on the examples provided on the CD to understand whats happening. She seems to take for granted the reason you bought this book in the first place is because you dont know PHP.