Rating:  - Buggy Examples
Why do I have to give this even 1 star? The early examples in the book didn't work, so I put it down and never went back to it.
Rating: - Learning PHP 5 is a mis-nomer.
This mis-titled book is probably the worst book I've ever purchased from that most respected technical publisher, O'Reilly.
I say the book is mis-titled since it weasel-words the title of "Learning PHP 5" (and all the new OOP re-write) into a few hundred pages devoted to the standard language constructs available in previous versions, and all but omits the real changes incorporated in the new version.
In fact, of the 254 pages in the chaptered part of the book only two pages even mention object oriented programming in this context, and simply recommend other O'Reilly books as reference.
I'm disappointed that O'Reilly would have let this book reach distribution
Rating:  - stuck at chapter 7
I bought an O'Reilly book to teach myself perl & it was great. I'm writing a review about this one because I'm frustrated. The first six chapters go by like a breeze for folks familiar with other programming languages (I use perl, mel, c, html, studio). well, that's not entirely true. I couldn't get my apache server to execute any of my php code (I'm on a new mac mini). I followed all the instructions in appendix A to no avail. Finally, I just uploaded my php scripts to a webserver & my code worked there. but that's super annoying because I have to upload my php file every time I want to test it (& sometimes my internet connection is slow). whatever. anyway: when I got to chapter 7 none of the examples worked anymore & it is extremely vague exactly how you're supposed to run some commands. for example: if you want to set up a database, you run the following command only one time:
CREATE TABLE dishes (
dish_id INT,
dish_name VARCHAR(255),
price DECIMAL(4,2),
is_spicy INT
)
but where do you run it from? also, the book relies heavily on using extensions that weren't installed in my version of php. additionally, I'm not sure if certain examples are just there to demonstrate what should work, or things that actually work. ie: this code is supposed to connect you to a database:
require 'DB.php';
$db = DB::connect('mysql://penguin:top^hat@db.example.com/restaurant');
is that actually supposed to work, or is it just an example? if it doesn't work for me (which it didn't), then I have to figure out what's wrong w/my system etc.
another frustrating this is the book recommends using several commands (like running system commands) that my webserver doesn't allow for security reasons. this problem should at least be addressed in the book. hopefully, I'm not just frustrated with php itself because several of my coworkers swear by it. but I've had more luck tracking down answers to very basic questions online than finding them in this book.
Rating: - It's not good when a book for beginners has bugs in the code.
I'm sorry, but this book is just down right lousy. It was the very first book I ever picked up to teach me PHP. Back then, I had assumed that all books on technical matters would be as close to perfect as one could get. However, as I typed away at my initial pages, nothing was working right. There was constant errors. As a beginner, this is quite frustrating, because you just have no idea as to what you could be doing wrong. Well...as I looked online in the errata section for the book, there was so much information as to the corrections to the code, that I might as well have gone to the Errata section for free rather than waste my time and money. Now, with more experience, the bugs are so bluntly obvious as to what was wrong. Not like a typo, or a group of text missing. But I mean, obvious very "simplistic" code that was...just the wrong code. And this isn't very professional to have code that obvious be printed. It shows that it wasn't tested.
What's more: PHP5 is a huge evolution to the previous incarnations. While there's some basic coverage of things such as XML parsing, there's nothing about classes, or anything that makes PHP5 different. So, for the traditional procedural style of coding, there's far better books out there on the topic of PHP4, and there's far more valuable resources to get you up to speed in php5 that give you actual projects.
Rating:  - I liked...
Well written and organized. One thing I should mention is that there is a lot of hand holding as the book is really made for beginners.
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