Customer Rating:  
Summary: Not bad...
Comment: Very helpful aside from minor coding errors.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Poor Book for Beginners!
Comment: This book is really hard to understand for beginners. Topics jump all over places. It's so unorganized to follow. Trust Me this book is not for beginners.
Customer Rating:
Summary: a learning book, but not a useful one
Comment: Let me start by saying in general O'Reilly books have been the best books I've picked up to learn from. The usually cover the basics in depth and then provide excellent examples and more advanced topics to ponder. This book covers the basics, mostly, and then procedes to fail to provide good examples, and really doesn't enter into the depths of PHP.
Other more knowledgable people have said this already, I'm just helping drag the rating down to where it deserves to be, which is not more than 2 stars.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good Book
Comment: Programming PHP is a great introduction to PHP. The chapters are well written with good examples that explain what is being discussed. The chapters are not written in a "read one after the other" fashion, so you can easily go to the chapter you need information on and find what you are looking for. This book did have some errors in the sample code, but if you read the text and actually try out the examples you can easily figure out what needs to be fixed to get them running. Since the O'Reilly "Programming" series is more about advanced programming issues, I think this book should have had the title "Learning PHP". It just seems to be an introduction, because it did not delve into any advanced topics. It is worthy to have on any PHP developers bookshelf. Recommended for beginners.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A cmprehensive language overview
Comment: This text is another well-produced O'Reilly reference. It provides a methodical description of the PHP server scripting language. If you don't know what PHP is, this is a good starting point. If you have never programmed before, why are you using PHP? (you should learn programming somewhere else than exposing your work on the WWW - in my opinion!). Very detailed descriptions of the language elements are provided; language structure, data types, variables, operators, anything you would expect from a programming language text. Good detailed sections on string handling (isn't that chiefly why you use server scripts?) and arrays are included. Examples showing how to strip 'bad characters' or HTML from strings are helpful, detailed regular expression usage and variable argument functions are very practical. For advanced programmers, the text provides details on objects (called classes) that allow you to incorporate OOP into your server scripts. Sections are provided that gives details of graphics programming using the GD extension and PDF text document creation that I found to be useless. The appendix includes a good section on all PHP functions which is a handy reference.... The description of database support is really limited. They hardly mention MySQL or mSQL and focus more on PEAR DB, which is an object-oriented database system. I found this as a major weakness. Otherwise, this is another admirable O'Reilly offering.
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