Customer Rating: 
Summary: A Gift if you like PHP
Comment: This was not my first PHP book, and probably it is not the best first book because it doesn't have a fun project to get you psyched. If you've got some of the thick books and feel like you sort of know PHP, this book is like taking a class from a master, with an emphasis on fundamentals. Disorganized and others have said some errors, but you are going to learn something. It is the book I always refer to first and it usually answers my question. I like the fact that it is thin by programming book standards. So to summarize, if you are going to buy 2 or more PHP books I highly recommend this one!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Comment: O Reilly publishes the best programming books--they're accurate, elegant and get to the point quickly. Unfortunately, this book is an exception. I agree with the complaints of the other reviewers, e.g., the text has buried information and incorrect examples. However, my main ojection is the index. It appears that the authors simply searched for every keyword in the book then tabulated them in the index. Thus, the index is hardly useful. It's no good to look through several pages just to find that the keyword was used once in a passing sentence that has little to do with that topic.
Customer Rating:
Summary: not worthed
Comment: It sure tries to teach you something but cannot achieve...
As everyone mentioned before, it has countless errors and typos. But there is more than that. Book is out of focus. Examples makes no sense and not related to each other, which is very confusing.
A piece of code here and other piece is there. Every example is coming out of nowhere. It doesn't have a project. So everytime different variables, situations. Like, in one example it uses Flintstones character names ($name=Fred, $name2 = fred etc.). Next example is subjects of a class (math, science, history, english etc.), on other one it uses very random strings like ("I like paris in november", "the key is in my pants")
If you want to learn PHP, stick with "PHP and MySQL Web Development, Second Edition" By Luke Welling, Laura Thompson.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Full Of Errors, Not For Beginners
Comment: This book has code examples which are full of typos. For example, the code for "self-processing pages" on page 166 won't parse. The publisher's list of unconfirmed errata goes on for 12 printed pages. This is in addition to the confirmed errata, another 2 pages. It does not look like the book's authors want to acknowledge their mistakes or participate in correcting them.If you are a beginner, steer clear of this book. If you do get it, be prepared to spend a considerable amount of time researching each and every parse error.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Shallow Content, Many Errors, Poor Examples
Comment: I almost always turn to O'Reilly first when purchasing a new reference book, however this time I was disappointed. This book is fairly shallow in content and much of the information that you need is actually buried in the text instead of being presented as a topic unto itself.The thing that is the most bothersome, however, is the plethora of flat out errors. Many of the examples have typos, missing code, etc. Even as a PHP novice I was constantly spotting errors which is frustrating when you're trying to learn the language. On top of that, many of the examples exhibit just plain bad programming form (inefficient code, variables that are only used once, etc). It's the kind of thing that makes a seasoned programmer wince (and if I was reviewing the code I would send it back to the author with lots of red ink).
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