Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Book Review
Comment: I thought this book was over all very helpfull. I have a degree in CS and speaking from a person with a lot of programming experience it was very easy to read and find help on the topics i needed too. I like how the author explains a lot of the programming style, principals and general good coding technique as well as the PHP synax, fuctions and what they do. If you have a bit of experiece this book is a good quick read. If your new to the field there's a lot to take in and you won't cover the entire book in a week but it's a good thing that all the information is there.
Customer Rating:
Summary: To Put It Simply: A Very Well Written Book
Comment: Although I have a number of years experience as a programmer, I am very new to web programming, especially server-side scripting. Both my son and I are now learning PHP in order to expand our programming knowledge and to gain some web-automation experience. My son is the webmaster for the videa yearbook at his high school, and he was specifically interested in getting rid of some tedious web maintenance issues by converting at least a part of his site over to dynamic web pages using PHP.
I spent some time selecting a book on PHP to help us both in our ventures - always a tough choice, unless of course you have lots of money, and are willing to buy 10 books at random and then pick the best bits out of them all.
I read the reviews of this book here on Amazon, and based on the overall very positive response from other purchasers, I went ahead and picked up a copy.
One great pleasure I found with this book is that the writer takes the time to express himself in a very readable fashion, while still covering a lot of technical issues. I especially like the way the book is broken down into sections based on what you want to accomplish with PHP, rather than just being a linear list of its functions.
I have yet to deeply venture into the sections on integrating MySQL with PHP, but from the quick looks I have made at those chapters, they seem to be equally well written.
I highly recommend the book to anyone.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "Novice to Finished Project" Ahead of Schedule
Comment: Prior to purchasing this book I had some web design experience, as well as some programming experience from years ago. Then recently I took a programming course based around Java, and in November successfully bid for a web project which I knew would need a database and some dynamic web pages. After a little research I decided that the PHP/MySQL combination would suit, and then I browsed Amazon for a suitable book to get me started.
I can honestly say that Jason Gilmore's "From Novice to Professional" book has been an excellent investment for me. The learning curve was nowhere near as steep as I was anticipating, and it got me from "novice to finished project" a month ahead of schedule. I'm not saying that I didn't have to source a certain amount of information elsewhere - mainly from web forums - but Jason's book was the mainstay of my reference material. Not only that, but during testing of the project I ran in to one major problem that I could not find the answer to anywhere. One email to Jason and he was good enough to reply within twenty minutes with a working solution. This turned out to be a significant added value to my investment in the book.
I found the book to be well written and the sample code to amply demonstrate the points being made. Unlike some people who seem to only look for "real world" examples I would much rather see concise code that directly demonstrates the concepts under consideration than a "real world" example that may never bear any relevance to what I want to achieve. This book gives me such concise examples. In addition it does also provide a number of real world examples that have also proved useful. For example I duplicated the MySQL database class quite early on in my project and that has definitely saved me considerable subsequent work and given me a more robust site.
The structure of the book is both good for reading in sequence and for dipping back into as reference material. Although I have now had to source more advanced material to move on to the next level, I still keep this book to hand and refer back to it regularly.
I thoroughly recommend this book.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good, mostly!
Comment: Hi,
When I read a few pages of this book at my local bookstore, I was impressed. The author is eloquent and candid, the code was legible and easy to follow, and the price was reasonable. It all was good until I started to notice that Mr. Gilmore was giving such a trivial examples that I really can't find much use for them. The book's subtitle "From Novice To Professional" is a blatant exageration. As a programmer, I could tell Mr. Gilmore did not address any advanced subject with any emphasis whatsoever.
One thing that bugged me quite a bit is the fact that I found at least 3 hypothetical outputs that were wrong with respect to what the code sample should have produced (all in the first 4 chapters). To me, that's unacceptable. When writing code, one has to think in layers and keep in mind the behavior of pretty much all of the routines and values of variables at any given time. If you are told by the author that function x(foo) sorts foo in ascending order but the output is in descending order then what gives? should you use that function to sort ascending- or descending-wise?
The coverage of simple programming principles is laughable (id est what's a queue and a stack, loops, time complexity, etc) or right out non-existant.
It's a good book for BEGINNERS (in the most literal sense of the word), but pretty much of no use for intermediates or advanced users.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I never thought I could only have only one book
Comment: And that is about any topic. Usialy I have to go around and buy two or even three books to get all the information or understand everything about a topic. I had 3 for Visual Basic, 2 for C++ and 3 for Java. I am half way through Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL: From Novice to Professional and I never felt I was missing out by not buying something else. It contains everything I need to realy become proficient in PHP and MySQL.
Thank you Mr. Gilmore!
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