Sams: The Welling and Thomson book is more "hands-on" in that it takes the reader step-by-step in developing an e-commerce website. The chapters are organized in a goal-oriented manner: PHP, MySQL, the basics of e-commerce, security, and design of the site.

O'Reilly: The Williams and Lane book is structured in a similar way by showing readers PHP and then MySQL. Examples to reinforce concepts are also provided. While the O'Reilly book also tries to take the reader in developing an e-commerce site, it is a bit more theoretical. Also, there are some differences in focus: the O'Reilly book has a section on using JavaScript while the Sams book has a final chapter on creating PDF files using PHP.

If I had to choose just one book, I would go with the Sams book due to its more gentle learning curve. However, I believe that the O'Reilly book is no slouch, and I will probably come to appreciate it more once I gain more experience in PHP and MySQL development.

One last word about my programming background: I knew a bit of Perl, Java, HTML, and JavaScript before tackling PHP and MySQL. I consider myself to be an "advanced beginner" (an oxymoron, of course). To get the most out of these two books, you should know HTML well enough to read it (you should at least recognize some tags) and it would definitely be helpful if you have some programming experience. You could very well make PHP your first programming language, but I would advise against it. Start with something like Perl (whose syntax is very similar to PHP's).

I highly recommend both books to prospective PHP and MySQL developers who are willing to spend some time and effort.

The book had me confused in a few places, but with careful rereading I was able to puzzle everything out. The examples are very helpful and great starting places for your own code. This book combined with a little online research at the php.net forums is all anyone should need to create a complex database driven website.

I was not a programmer when I read it, but I can now confidently code fairly interesting things. I had an objective in mind, but I didn't know how to create it. Now I do, so I saved a few thousand dollars on hiring someone else.

I knew what object-oriented programming was, but didn't know what power it hid inside. Now I can harness the power of PEAR and phpclasses.org. Accessor functions was quite an eye opener for me. Please don't laugh :-).

I had a faint understanding of C, but this book introduces you to the concepts gradually and smoothly. Before you know it, you start thinking like a C programmer. Yet the beauty of PHP is that you don't have to worry about memory allocations, variable definitions (although something like Options Explicit would be welcome), or variable types.

If you are an absolute beginner to programming and databases, you will probably be a little lost along the way. Just read it a few times and it will start to make sense, I promise.

As for me, I was an IT person who had a mission to do. At first I wrote a simple application using Dreamweaver MX, which is the absolute best software to use for this purpose, and ran out of built in options to do what I wanted to do. The next logical thing was to read an appropriate book. I've spent a few hours choosing, and finally settled on this one as most promising to teach me exactly what I needed to know. Corporate electronic libraries have their perks.

The book progresses smoothly to gently introduce the reader to the main string operations functions, variables, variable operations, classes, functions, and then it goes in-depth on specific integration issues of php, mySQL, and specific applications that are commonly necessary.

You will learn sessions, error handling, how to implement secure transactions and so on. Believe me, you can build an application that you can charge thousands for after reading this. I've done just that as a result because I no longer had to hire a contractor to get my work implemented exactly as it was specified in my design documents.

If you have a real world problem, you need real world solutions, not the "Hello world!" examples. This book is exactly what you want to read. I've read well over 300 computer books in general, and this one is really one of the very best I've ever read.

If you are a smart person who was given a mission impossible to implement in PHP with mySQL, this book will get you to at least intermediate level fast.

Enjoy your trip,

Leonid