PHP 5 Fast & Easy Web Development

I highly recomend this book to anyone that has no experience in PHP or MySQl and has a desire to learn both. This book's step by step chapters makes it easy to learn and use PHP. Before I was done with this book I was already coding my own PHP/MySQL programs and rewriting open-source PHP programs like PHP-Nuke and phpBB among others. This book is an excelent buy at any price!

Using this book and a few choice websites, I was able to create my very own PHP/MySQL driven website for users to sell books. I highly recommend this book for anyone looking to learn PHP that have *some* programming experience

This book is a descent introduction to PHP. It covered a lot of useful topics including sending email, file system functions, cookies/sessions and MySQL connections. The largest project in the book was a simple content management system. Even though basic programming concepts are covered as well I think it still helps to have at least a little familiarity with programming or scripting. I only spotted a few minor errors throughout the book. For the most part all the examples worked smoothly. I did have some difficulties with the first three chapters in the book. These chapters dealt with installing PHP and MySQL. Many of the steps just didn't work as explained. At 500 plus pages and 25 chapters it is a pretty long book and does cover a lot of material. Still, it doesn't seem to go to deep into the details of most of the covered material. There is a great appendix that helps with this somewhat. But because of the low price and since this book is only an introduction I can still easily recommend it. It's actually used as a textbook for one of the local Colleges.

I went through this entire book and was quite impressed. After reading the reviews on how people didn't learn PHP using this book, I have come to the conclusion that they are mentally handicapped. This book is straight forward and gives you plenty of examples on how to manipulate MySQL databases and how to use php syntax and how to integrate it into your site. It covers cookies, sessions, and other VERY useful super globals. The book contains minor errata, like all text books, but these errors are easily noticed and fixed (ie missing semicolon). If you copy the code exactly and you dont bother to read about the concept of what you are doing I can see how you might not be able to learn, BUT if you actually read the book you will learn from this book! From this book I have been able to write my own database for a user authentication, forms, message boards, and much more! This book rocks my socks.

I have the original version of this book-I've been overdue in its deserved praise. At least I've bought another worthy title by the author, "Teach Yourself MySQL". This version adds sections on the burgeoning XML and MySQLite and some other stuff. My idea of programming is that you don't want to expend undue effort to understand a book about a programming language or even the language itself. Your energies are best applied to your actual task at hand. That's the beauty of this book(and of PHP!). The clear, staightforward and simple examples of how PHP actually works got me rolling and I've gone on to create some rich and feature packed dynamic websites. The reference sections are quite useful too, though they are not comprehensive- www.php.net fills in the holes.