Rating:  - Needed to be reviewed.
This book would have a lot of potential if only it had been edited properly. There are simply too many inconsistencies and outright mistakes for me to give this book a good review. The concepts are nice, and ideas good, and the wording easy to read. Problem is, I don't feel I can trust any of the examples, and I learn by example. It doesn't feel like the authors bothered to read their own book.
Rating:  - For Intermediate Developers with Intelligence
This book is great for experienced developers looking for some ideas in how you can use PHP to implement your application designs.
There are some obvious mistakes and bad design choices in the book, but most intelligent developers will spot these.
The last part of the book is an end-to-end review of a PHP5 life cycle, and it's pretty worthless if you're at all a postmodern developer.
This book is good for some programming ideas and for scratching the surface of how to design good PHP5 web applications.
Rating:  - Great breadth, questionable concepts
I gave it 3 stars for the inspiration that the discussion of a great breadth of PHP/OOP topics provides. There's everything from design techniques to coding practices to project management. Unfortunately, the treatment of most topics is somewhat cursory and many of the code examples are either not thought out carefully or don't work. Thus the code, although it takes up a substantial part of the book, has to be seen as illustration material only. Some of the concepts I found confusing. For example, I am not quite able to understand the purpose of a collection class (chapter 5), given PHP's dynamical typing and associative arrays. Furthermore, the MVC model (chapter 13) is introduced as having a fourth "infrastructure" component. I am not sure what architecture model this would constitute, but it is probably not an MVC model. There are many such quirks in ths book. Programmers who are interested in advanced OOP concepts will find this book to be a good overview of methodical -as opposed to ad hoc- software construction with PHP. In order to actually learn and apply these techniques, a more thorough introduction to object-oriented theory and design is probably required.
Rating:  - Excellent!
I have been a PHP programmer for several years now, and this book just took things to a new level for me. It inspired me to build more scalable and secure applications and to become a better programmer. Though this book is about Object Oriented PHP, it also covers things like Project Management, templating, and specific Design Patterns.
This book is chock full of great code examples - real world examples. The authors have a great writing style that makes this book an easy read without getting bored or lost.
If you are looking to become a professional PHP programmer, this book is a must read. It allows you to get a better grasp of OOP and its patterns and approaches.
Rating: - Excellent and Practical PHP programming practice guide
I think I have to agree with the lead Author's comment to address the concern of some reviewers. If you are good in your PHP4 skills and want to take it to the next level (very similar to practices followed by companies employing large-scale PHP based application development), then I believe, this would be an awesome book!
A lot of concepts shared by the Authors would be in parallel with George Schlossnagle's Advanced PHP Programming topics. Both are assets to aspiring PHP programmers who want to understand and architect better PHP based applications.
Regarding some code errors that some reviewers have pointed out..i would recommend the reader to stick to the underlying concept the program emphasizes rather than the syntax [Frankly, I have not executed any code from the book..but to say the least..the coding practice appears to be good]. The key is to grab the design concept and methodologies behind building robust web applications.
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