D. Nathan Abbott said
I bought about 25-30 PHP/MySQL books while learning & this was easily one of my top 5 most used. Programming PHP (Oreilly) and PHP 5 in Practice (Developer's Library) are also pretty solid. If you're ready for MySQL, replace the latter with PHP and MySQL Web Development (4th Edition, Developer's Library). I also found the Apress books fairly helpful. Definitely get the Cookbook, though. You'll reference it whenever you code.
Asaf Bar Lev said
Not much to say other than that this book continues the O'Reilly's legacy of top books for self learning.
ohmysohopeless said
PHP is intended for rapid web development, and it does not take that long to get comfortable with the language itself. However, it is a fairly flexible language, which allows for several ways to do the same thing but perhaps one way is definitely better than others; it takes time to learn the best practices. With PHP, it is easy to produce spaghetti codes if you are not careful, while it is certainly possible to make very solid object-oriented systems as well. The best way to learn in the end is to read a lot of well-written codes by capable, programmers with experiences, but for a developer who needs to code tons of stuff and has pressure to meet deadlines, time is precious. That is why this book is useful.
Much of PHP is specially designed for web development, so the book includes a lot of essential topics dealing with web development: XML, security, dealing with form data, i18n and l10n, database, and so on. In software development, new releases are norm, and some topics discussing actively developed modules do show their ages at times. However, there are still a lot you can learn from the standard O'Reilly quality book, rather than collecting hodge podge of information available on the web.
If you know some other language already and have read one or two introductory PHP web development book already, this will be the most used book on the shelve about PHP. This book and the official online documentation gets you quite far. In my case this has been easily the most used PHP book.
Steven Mercatante said
I'll keep this short - I love this book. It's come in handy more times than I can count. It contains great solutions to plenty of real world problems. I keep my copy at work, but plan on buying another copy to keep at home. I highly recommend this book.
Jin Kun Lin said
It is pretty good. Especially for the people who worked a little bit on php but not an expert yet. (That is me.)
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