Rating:  - If you want to make better code this is your book
This book is more than your trivial "PHP for Dummies". This book can help you become not only a better programmer; it can help make you a professional programmer. So far, I haven't found any other book that was any help for me.
Yes, some of the samples have errors and some of the topics you might have wanted a little more elaborate. But if you consider yourself professional or even aspire to it: Get over it. Fix the bugs and study up on the subjects.
I successfully moved our PHP development from design anarchy to a fully version controlled, MVC-pattern guided and template based PHP development. I appreciate all the help I got from Schlossnagle. Would someone please cut through all the ".NET for dummies" books out there and give me some of this?
Rating:  - Just read the book
This is the 3rd PHP book I've read. In my opinion, a professional PHP programmer can find a lot of useful things in this book about serious programming in PHP. The disadvantages of the book, however, are:
1. many errors in the code
2. also the code is not organized very well (it is not plug 'n' play)
3. the sort of difficult language (for non-English speaking readers)
Rating: - Absolutely excellent
Excellent book, not only for PHP, but also for any programming language, especially web-developpement languages.
Rating:  - Vague Concept Book - Nothing Immediately Useful
I'm very disappointed with this book. It touches on some concepts that could be useful but there is absolutely nothing in this book a PHP programmer can put to use right away. I've built several web sites using PHP/MySQL and there is not one single thing in this book useful to me.
The book is mainly a survey of concepts, NOT an advanced programming guide. Nothing in this book is fleshed out completely enough to actually begin using it in programming your website.
If you want to actually use any of the ideas in the book, you will have to find a better source of information and documentation for the particular idea or technology. For example, the book has a decent introduction to the Smarty template system but not enough info to actually start using it effectively. There are no performance or feature comparisons between Smarty and other template systems so I'm not even sure how you're supposed to decide if Smarty is right for you (the author merely mentions that Smarty is popular, not why you should or should not use Smarty). Another example: the book talks about three different load generators and gives examples of their use (about 1.5 pages each) but definitely not enough details to begin using any of them.
The only thing of value I got from this book is a conceptual understanding of reverse proxies. Of course, if you actually want to implement a reverse proxy yourself, you're going to need a lot more information than you'll find in this book.
I gave this book two stars instead of one because it is a halfway decent survey. The title, however, is totally inappropriate. It has nothing to do with advanced PHP programming. Instead, the title should be, "Shallow Survey of Concepts and Tools Related to PHP and Web Development".
Rating: - Very Good Concept Book
This book preaches very good concepts that are good guidelines to follow if you plan on conducting a multi-developer PHP project. It touches on many things such as coding standards, revision control with cvs, seperation of business and display logic using a template engine (smarty used as example), a brief discussion on object-oriented methodologies, and other useful development areas. He cites many "futher readings" in context which I found extremely helpful. All the examples in the book are very easy to understand and somewhat pertain to "real-world" situations (I found this a big plus since I don't like real abstract examples).
I have two complaints with the book (these are not THAT important and you should not buy this book just because of these two reasons. The book is VERY good for most PHP developers).
1 - I don't consider this that "advanced" of a book. I have been using this type of stuff for years now at my current work place -- although this would advanced for most "non-enterprise" developers (where teams are more than 5 or so).
2 - The lack of coding standard being used in the examples (something that he preaches about in one of the first chapters).
Other than those two complaints, this is great book for PHP developers looking to do stuff in a more "enterprise" way.
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