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.
Rating:  - A Random Walk Through Web Programming with PHP
This not a terrible book -- it's a decent book with a poor title. It should be called something like "A Random Walk Through Web Programming with PHP." There's certainly nothing advanced about it. This book would be ideal for someone who has just learned PHP but lacks any real knowledge of computer science.
Rating:  - Great outline; average implementation
PHP *needs* capable writers, like this one. Developers, who take time to write, seem rare - compared to writers, who rarely get to do development projects, anymore. This author is clearly a very experienced practitioner. He outlined a great table of contents.
He advocates and provides guidance for adhering to best practices, regarding design patterns, scalability, caching, unit testing, profiling & tuning etc. The last 1/6 of the book is about C language PHP extension. Excellent "Further reading" suggestions are provided at the end of each chapter.
Out of a high-volume PHP site developer, since 1999, I would expect creative examples. If your site provides Fibonacci sequences and readability scores web services, you'll find this book highly useful. Though on page 1, the author PROMISES NO* "foo-bar" examples, he provides plenty (on pages: 19, 53, 56, 68, 102, 158, 166, 227, 230, 255, 268, 274, 325, 373, 405, 466, 483, 484, 563). Since a reader devotes plenty of time to contemplating foo-bar examples, I came to realize why they bother me so much ... they're unimaginative (i.e. mentally lazy), regarding pragmatic applications for the technology.
I found myself constantly marking comma's in the text - to ease the readability and follow what was being said. If the author doesn't know where to put comma's, the editors should! There's no bold text - to illustrate lessons within the code. As far as I can remember, there's no offer of complete code (e.g. from a website), either.
This is a good, author with generally readable writing style and a wealth of experience to convey. I wouldn't dissuade anyone from buying this book; there's a tremendous amount to be learned and gained from this ... probably the most advanced PHP text, available. I'm just a bit disappointed, because, though it's very good, it could have been world class. I would buy future books from this author; I hope that they get even better!
Rating: - Very good but doesn't say a word about Windows...
I know PHP and Linux are a great match but people really do run PHP on Windows as well. This book acts like it is Linux only and never mentions the Windows implementation. Other than that this is great.
Rating:  - Excellent
Frankly, I think others have already said it so I'll keep this short. This book is a well-organized, easy to read compendium of best practices and advanced development techniques for the professional PHP programmer. Anyone who is developing medium to large scale web applications in PHP should read it.
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