When reading the book cover to cover, you are taught in a logical manner. The concepts of functions and arrays are taught before databases for example. Many books out there today jump ahead too quickly before the foundations are in place. This book does not. While teaching the foundations, Rasmus and Kevin show great programming style. As the preface mentions, their goal is not that you just become a PHP programmer, but a good PHP programmer.

Beyond the basic foundations presented in this book, it also covers topics such as creating images with GD, using the PDF features of PHP, and XML. For those that really want to get knee deep into PHP, they also have a chapter devoted to extending PHP by creating your own extensions. They walk you through creating a simple rot13 extension, then show you what you need to know in order to create more complicated extensions. There is also a chapter devoted to programming in PHP securely. This addresses issues that every PHP programmer, new and seasoned alike, need to pay attention to.

If you are looking for a book to break into the world of PHP, this one should be among the top of the list.

So, why did I give it only 4 stars? Well, there are so many errors in the sample code and between the descriptions and the sample code that it significantly slowed me down, by confusing me. These errors aren't always horrible, but just to give an example the book says, on page 84, that you call the get_meta_tags() function by passing it "the HTML for a web page in a string". Well, the sample shows passing it a URL and if you do pass it a string, it turns out, PHP crashes (at least my installation of PHP does). There are many other examples.

My advice is to not buy this if you expect it to teach you how to program, but if you already have a couple of other languages under your belt, and how to build web pages, this book will get you into PHP quick.

Included examples do not include excessive amounts of code, which in my opinion, makes it easier to understand the concepts. If you are looking for a book with huge elaborate application examples, you may wish to search elsewhere.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in PHP development.

I suppose I was particularly disappointed when I found that the example used to describe the array_filter function in Chapter 5 was almost exactly the same as is to be found on the Zend website! I say "almost", because that's exactly what it is - the book's example has been subjected to a somewhat half-hearted attempt at customisation, in my opinion, to try and make it look different from Zend's version. What is actually achieved in both cases is almost identical!

Now, it has long been known that O'Reilly books often offer much the same information as can be found elsewhere (except at the expense of a few trees) - but what is the point, may I ask, of going to the trouble of making a few cursory modifications to an example, if you're not actually going to make the example DO anything different? Is it just me?

I suppose it was just that I really wanted a different example of how to use that one function. However there are other functions related to array_filter which aren't even described in this text at all, and this is indicative of the content as a whole: big gaps in the information, interspersed with brief moments of Perl-like conciseness. Maybe a book of PHP function definitions is what I neeed, but what I don't need is this perfunctory Jack-of-all-Trades.

Ironically, this publisher ha an excellent record for producing original and informative content ON-LINE (for which I am often grateful), but the same does not seem to hold for much of their printed material. How they make any money, I don't know!