Review by for Programming PHP
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Programming PHP is written in part by Rasmus Lerdorf, the man who first created it and is still an active member of the development community. This can only be good news.The book is divided in chapters in a well-ordered and intuitive way. I get the impression that the authors wrote full chapters each, as they tend to vary in depth. In general, though, they present a wide variety of the features and potent of PHP, and, maybe most important, also discuss limitations.The book can be read by people with no knowledge on the subject whatsoever, though some programming experience would come helpful. The language is clear, precise and to-the-point. Code examples are presented after each point discussed. There is useful information spread all over the book, of the technical and not-so-technical kind, and I cannot imagine anybody going through the book without learning a few new things, however experienced they may be.Apart from chapters on the usual PHP features (strings, arrays, objects, etc.), there are subjects on commonly used web techniques (and why they are commonly used), security (server-side and scripting), writing your own PHP extensions, and one dedicated to the special relationship PHP has with windows. Personally, I believe the chapter on security alone is worth buying the book for.Sometimes the authors give the impression they like showing off (OK, so you can double a number by left-shifting), but this is rare and unobtrusive. So, why only 4 stars? Because the book hasn’t been very well edited (at least the first edition which I have): there are spelling and coding mistakes, and the latter is not only less than expected by such a company as O’Reilly, but can severely affect a programmer’s first steps into a new language.This said, this book is definitely worth buying. In fact, it’s the best descriptive book I’ve read on the sole subject of PHP, great as a reference book, and shouldn’t be missing from any PHP programmer’s library.

Review by for Programming PHP
Rating:
This book is similar to every other O’Reilly book in that it is clear, concise and to the point. Never does it waffle on, and never does it go into too much detail and complexity that everyone except the best programmers understands it.
I personally found the explanation of objects and their classes to be better than the other explanations I have read for different languages, and certainly made picking up OOP in PHP a lot easier. Throughout is the obvious knowledge of the authors, something always reassuring in a title like this. The book fits well for beginners and seasoned programmers alike: the basics are explained well, and the technical reasons why things happen are included for good measure.I was also surprised by the size of this book, as it significantly thinner than the other O’Reilly books (and other computer books for that matter), that I own. Computer books often appear large, daunting and dry. This book is an exception to that rule, and is perfectly good for someone wanting to learn PHP from the ground up to someone wanting to pick a chapter to swat up on, and use it as a reference book. All in all, a very good book.

Review by David Precious for Programming PHP
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PHP is a great language to start creating dynamic websites with - it’s easy to learn, but very powerful.This book will start you out on the right tracks with PHP and help you build up your experience - even once you’re experienced, you’ll still turn to it for reference.As usual, it’s a solid O’Reilly title, it won’t let you down. Being co-written by Rasmus himself (the creator of PHP) it benefits from more than a little extra experience and inside information.Basically, if you want to create dynamic websites with a lot of power, PHP is the language you want, and this is the book.

Review by Martin Anderson for Programming PHP
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Written in the standard O’Reilly style, this book gives you a comprehensive coverage of PHP without being overly verbose or too dryly technical. Now in its 2nd edition this book covers the most recent version of PHP, version 5.

While I wouldn’t want to learn PHP as a first programming language from this book, anybody with a basic knowledge of HTML and an OOP based language (Java, C++ or even JavaScript) will quickly be able to code PHP.

While the book isn’t perfect: the aforementioned lack of concrete examples (the cynic in me might think that O’Reilly were saving these for the PHP Cookbook which is due out soon) and the chapter on objects being only 20 pages long, it’s still all you would need as both a reference and a learning resource. A strong buy.

Review by Amateur photographer, professional programmer for Programming PHP
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I found this book a good introduction to PHP. But, it has a lot of mistakes. I think these have happened when the book was updated to cover PHP 5.

For example, when it describes constructors it says the constructor is a function named __construct(). But then it immediately gives an example where the constructor for class Person is a function called Person(). The former is PHP 5, the latter is PHP 4. Perhaps the update was a rush job.

If you can’t already program in C or C++ then this book may not be for you. If you can, then it’s OK.