Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Smarty
Comment: Smarty. The title is just as short and simple as the book itself. The first few chapters cover why you would want to use Smarty. This has always been the biggest slowdown of Smarty adoption: why use a template language? Isn't PHP already a template language? Isn't Smarty slow? What does the workflow look like? All of these questions are covered in these first few chapters. (The speed of Smarty is covered at the end in more detail, too.)
After that, the rest of the book covers the actual Smarty template language. There are two main sections that teach the reader: one section for template designers and one for programmers -- just like how the Smarty homepage is set up. Basically, each section covers the exact same material that's on the Smarty homepage, only in a more logical progression. Rather than a standard reference-manual format, these sections are laid out with several real-word projects and examples.
If you're new to Smarty, or have thought about learning it, I would definitely buy this book. However, if you're already familiar with the language, you really won't gain anything new here -- except printed documentation, which is always nice. Overall, Smarty is a great book for beginners.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Unfortunately there is nothing else!
Comment: I am new to PHP and templating technology. I have used ASP.NET and ASP, but have started doing some work with LAMP, so I figured I would try to make my work easier with Smarty.
I did a quick search for Smarty here on Amazon and could only find one book on Smarty, so I bought it, the E version anyway. After reading a few pages I found that I could not stand the way the author writes.
I have read quite a bit of technical books, this definately rates among the worst I have read. The author fails to make his subject interesting. I understand this is not a novel, but still, I believe that technical writers, above all, need to make the subject interesting.
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