Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely the best PHP book I've used
Comment: Thanks David!!
This is by far the best PHP book I've purchased. PHP and MySQL are much easier to understand then ASP and SQL Server. This is coming form someone that learned ASP and MSSQL first.
Regards!
Rich
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Not for beginners
Comment: If you're looking for a book to learn php, this one's not the one. The author is relying heavily on the reader's mind-reading abilities figuring out what to do. This book requires lots of head scratching, note taking, and is very frustrating to follow. It contains far too many mistakes and typos to have been released. It seems the buyer is the proof reader. Several times I have thought I had made a mistake only to find that it was yet another mistyped line/word/phrase in the book. The download files given to compare the work to are not the same as the ones created if you're following the chapters. Maybe it's good for experienced programmers, but if I were experienced with php, would I need the book? I guess software/programming books are much like software itself: authors and developers release it and rely on the buyers to find the mistakes and fix them after it has been sold. Only with a book you're stuck wit hit. The corrections mentioned on the publisher's website for this book contain errors, too. So don't rely on them to be correct!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Looks Good!
Comment: After skimming the book, and reading several chapters, I cannot wait to sit down with Dreamweaver 8 and really put the clearly written book to use. I believe it and Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8 by David Powers will compliment each other.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Brilliant... definately worth buying
Comment: I am pretty new to PHP, with not a great deal of coding experience. Over the last year I have bought 4 books, each which have been hailed as 'The best book for learning PHP.' Sadly, these books have been too dry or detailed for me to follow as a beginner, so most of my learning has come from online tutorials.
This book however is quite different... David Powers gives good practical applications, and goes through the steps of coding them, explaining why and how along the way.. so it becomes a much more interesting and interactive learning experience. This is a great book, a big thumbs up to David Powers.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not exactly "easy" but easier than anything else I've tried so far.
Comment: I was probably about two books shy of giving up on ever learning anything useful about PHP so I'm thrilled to have discovered this book when I did!
I'm not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination but I know HTML, a fair amount of CSS, and I have a cursory understanding of how programming works. I've also successfully (but not often painlessly) installed and customized several ready-made PHP scripts so I've long been aware of how much more PHP could help me accomplish if I only had a better understanding of it.
I purchased several books on the subject over the years but could never get much past the first few chapters with any of them -- usually not even that much. Among my biggest problems was that it seemed I wasn't getting enough doses of practical information to stay motivated. This also made it difficult to be aware of any progress I might be making -- or if I even was. Sometimes the information didn't build up logically enough for me so it was harder to retain anything I might have learned. Often, even when a book claimed to be for beginners, in some areas it used jargon or presumed I knew things I didn't know at all while becoming excruciatingly basic in other areas. It was a constant struggle with little or no reward.
But none of this was the case with PHP SOLUTIONS.
I've been methodically reading just a few pages (rarely more) every night so as not to overload my circuits which were already weakened from so much frustration. The information is authoritative but the writing style is approachable, both of which made it so much easier for me to persevere. I also didn't allow myself to get too bogged down or frustrated: if there was something I wasn't getting, even after a few passes, I moved on with the hopes it would make more sense later, and it usually did. But I feel as though I'm at least grasping the majority of what's been presented. Although I have not been following along and performing the exercises as recommended (just reading and studying), I still sense definite progress and comprehension that I never felt with any of the other books. Once I decide on something I want to incorporate into a web site, I will revisit those chapters more thoroughly. This probably wouldn't work for most people, but it usually works best for me.
At any rate, I'm nearly half way through the book now and still eager to continue. That's enough to convince me. I can't say I expect to ever be able to write my own scripts from scratch (unless they're very simple), but if I'm at least able to find my way around many existing scripts (surely the ones covered in this book) and customize them for my own needs, it will be HUGE. And I CAN say I feel confident I'll be able to achieve at least that much, which I know will serve my needs and is much more than I expected after all the false starts and frustrations I've been through and how close I came to quitting.
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