Learning PHP 5

Easy read. There are also so many examples, that I just want to test each one out. I highly recommend for anyone who doesn't know anything about PHP.

I took my last programming language class 10 years ago, haven't programmed for more than 5 years. After I read this book for 3 days, I can do many easy PHP programs. Well worth the price paid.

Great book if you are a beginner. The book will teach you everything you should know to read avanced books. After reading Learning PHP 5 I got everything that I wanted from this book. It presented the basics in a clear and concise way- so that you do not have to dig through the text to find what a particular thing means. Although it will not make you an advanced or expert PHP programmer, nor does it attempt to, you will learn how to write some basic functions and more importantly for me - read PHP code.

This book is fabulous! I've been programming PHP for some time now, though I've never tackled a large project. And I wasn't really sure how to do it, frankly, until stumbling across Mr. Sklar. After seeing him speak at the last O'Reilly Open Source convention here in Portland, and realizing I'd already read one of his other books, I decided to look at this one. I was quite surprised! Usually O'Reilly's Learning titles are a little slow, but this one is Perfect. You start with the basics, and he's rather good at not telling you more than you really do need to know, and by the end of the book his examples have built on each other to the point that you have a wonderful and flexible library for passing data between forms, your app, and a database. His explanations are well written and not too wordy. You really come away with a much deeper understanding of the language than any other book I've read can provide. I highly recommend this title. I'm giving it five stars. Keep up the great work, Mr. Sklar!

From the title I would have expected that the book spend all of it's slim 300 page frame on a soup to nuts language introduction. For the first six chapters it looks that way as it rolls through language basics, variables, conditionals, arrays, etc. But then it veers into the practical for the rest of the book and covers topics such as database access through Pear DB and the use of XML. There is a lot to like about this book. The chapters are short, focused and practical. And I have no issues recommending the book on a technical level. Especially the database section which advocates simple safe SQL practices. In particular you should follow the advice on page 126 about using the '?' operator in your SQL queries. There isn't much new for PHP 4 programmers looking to learn about PHP 5. In fact there is little or no emphasis placed on teaching you to write classes. The only information about classes is about their consumption. This is definitely not a book for the experienced PHP developer, but for a beginner this is one of the best.