Customer Rating: 
Summary: AWESOME intro to PHP for those w/ programming experience
Comment: Hi all. This is the first text that I've ever bothered to review on Amazon, but I do so now because I think that this book is *very* under-rated. This book is a SOLID 5 STAR INTRODUCTION TO PHP for the experienced programmer. If you already know perl or java, this book is a ultra-high-speed yet thoroughly comprehensible survey of PHP syntax and usage. Very complete treatment of the language. My only caveat: If you have no programming background, i would imagine that it may be a little terse.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Rasmus *is* an author
Comment: I'm the editor of Programming PHP. I can vouch for the fact that Rasmus was a fully-fledged author. Besides fact-checking everything that the other authors wrote, he contributed many chapters of his own. I don't know where the idea that Rasmus was "just supervising" or "has not done any major writing" came from (it's not a conclusion you could come to from actually *reading* the book) but it's absolutely wrong.By all means be vague ("fairy land") and strange (LDAP and SNMP as "what makes PHP what it is today"?!) in reviews, but please don't be dishonest. For my rating of this book, by the way, I came as close to the current average ranking as I could. I'm obviously not impartial (I think the book's a 5!) but I don't want my partiality to bias the reader ratings.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good introduction to the language
Comment: This book is a good introduction to the language. Veterans may not get a lot out of it, but might still find the chapters on dealing with databases, images and PDF useful. Newbies, beginners and intermediate users will probably benefit most from this book. PHP is a fairly easy language to learn, and this is a very good book to learn it from.
Customer Rating:
Summary: -1 for false advertising, -2 for poor quality.
Comment: When I bought this book, I purchased it for 2 reason's:1) Its an ORA book and they have in the past published high quality technical references. 2) It was "authored" by Rasmus Lerdorf, the father of PHP. I figured it must be a definitive guide. When I bought this book, I felt a bit swindled. First of all, it seems that Rasmus only served as an editor type, not really writing the book, just supervising. Most of the content was written by the other author(s). He gets top billing on amazon, no doubt, because O'Reilly is betting that name recognition is what is going to make you purchase this book. On top of that the book is really only mediocre. While some of the writing is lucid, at points the author does seem to depart into fairy land (not that there is anything wrong with fairy land, I just have better things to do with my time than take a visit). Furthermore, "Programming PHP" misses a lot of what php is about, and how you can harness PHP. The coverage of PHP's core components (numbers, arrays, strings, objects, oh my!) is pretty good, but once they get into the nitty gritty, they seem to ignore the gritty. Leaving you with a taste for the subject, but no real substance. Furthermore, they neglect many of the topics that make PHP what it is today, including, ldap interaction, compression, snmp interaction, mail handling, system integration, RPC, COM and Java integration and a sleuth of other features. In summary, if you want a nice pretty ORA reference, this is the book for you, if you want substance, I reccomend either "The PHP Developer's Cookbook" or one of Wrox's series (all are pretty good, choose according to your competency level).
Customer Rating:
Summary: Mediocre coverage
Comment: This book is a half baked attempt at teaching PHP programming.It has a poor organization,missing php functions, and lack of in-depth examples with good explanations.If your are a newbie to the world of PHP programming and desperately need a reference to get you started, this may be the book for you. If you have the will to fight it out and can't find any other resources, then this is a must-have. Its frustrating enough when you know what your looking for and can't find it. I find myself using the online documentation far more than I use this book. Also it seems like Rasmus has not done any major writing on this book and has been misleading to me as a customer.
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