Rating:  - Good intro into using PHP and MySQL
I am a long time programmer (15 years) and wanted to start a new project based on PHP scripts and a MySQL database. This book was quite helpfull in getting me started. It wasn't necessary to read the entire book. I read those sections that were signifigant to what I needed. My background is very heavy on Enterprise products like SAS, Oracle, and DB2. The project I was working on didn't require such huge resources so I picked up this book and setup a linux box with a LAMP configuration to get started.
The book is a good starting point. Paticularly important is the interaction between HTML and MySQL in PHP. You can get a lot of information on just PHP from the PHP documenation. The best value I got out of the book was learning about the interaction between PHP and MySQL.
Rating:  - Great condition as promised
Book was received in a timely manor and condition as promised.
Rating:  - Wrong book for me, right book for some
I knew I had picked up the wrong book when, in the first or second chapter, the authors said that variable types didn't matter and that they wouldn't bother covering them until late in the book. Admittedly, I can see their point, but the way the statement was written made it apparent that they were aiming this at HTML authors and other people with little to no real programming experience. If you want to pick up the PHP language and already have experience with a real programming language or two, you'd be better off picking up something else. If not, this book actually would be a good way to get started.
Update: Now that I've chewed through a little more of the book, I would no longer recommend this book to even a beginner. Uncommented, and hard to read examples that make poor use of whitespace dominate later chapters. The examples aren't the 3-4 page long beasts you find in some C or Java books, but nonetheless, this book does not demonstrate good coding practices, and should not be used by a new programmer to pick up the ropes.
Rating: - A good book but with many typos
I have enjoyed this book and it is very well written with enough to get you going. However there are a lot of typos in the book. Most of them are easily ignorable such as a space omitted in an unimportant area or a simple hit of the wrong key. Generally you can ignore it and there is no problem with understanding the material.
Although Table 8-5 is pretty much useless (I haven't checked others). Just by making a simple string I found 4 mistakes and had to resort to web resources to get the right date strings.
Overall I wouldn't base my decision on that alone as it is a good book. I'm not unfamiliar with programing so learning the php was just learning the syntax. I however had never touched mySQL in my life before this and the book made it quite painfully clear.
Rating: - An easy introduction
If you want to do "something" using PHP and MySQL, and you don't know anything about these tools, this book will help you a lot!
You will find everything you need to a quick start.
I recommend it !
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