Rating:  - Extensions? What extensions?
You would think that a PHP book that actually mentioned "Extensions" as part of the title would cover extensions wouldn't you? Well in the case of this book you would be wrong. The index has exactly 1 entry for 'extensions' and even that is a 1 sentence footnote! Compare that to the 45 pages devoted to the subject in George Schlossnagle's book "Advanced PHP Programming" and you can get an idea of actually how deficient this book is in this aspect.
Rating:  - Not for beginners
This is really only for advanced PHP programmers. If you are one, it maybe will render in 5 star.
Rating:  - Good, but not great
I bought this book with high expectations.
It is a very good book, well written, and David Sklar really has done a good job writing it. However, I didn't find it that useful. It wasn't even remotely close to comprehensive about what it covered, and made only footnote mention of other tools that are out there.
I ended up returning it -- something I rarely do. I didn't think it was worth the money. Most of this info is available for free online anyways.
Rating: - Helpful but not comprehensive
This book does alert you to many useful modues, extensions and accelerators and given that many of these are open source and their documentation can be skimpy, it's good to have examples and documentation from another source.
However, this book is not comprehensive in it's coverage of said modules, extensions and accelerators and in areas where it covers material already explained in the documentation, I preferred the original documentation's style and explanations. The book does mention things that the original documention does not, but the original documentation talks about things that the book does not.
In short, I had to read both the documentation and the book to fully understand the code.
Rating:  - Good book for add-on tools
I have found HTML & Smarty chapter very useful. You will also find other chapter useful if you have to work on them in real life projects. Overall very practical book.
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