Rating:  - More like Gang of Shut the Heck Up
The first quarter of this book is an excellent primer on what's new and different in PHP5's objects; much better than the terse, incomplete, and often times grammatically broken, descriptions one finds in the free online documentation. The remaining three quarters, while generally well written when you look at individual segments, commit the most heinous of errors the author strives to warn against: repetition. It seems like every other page contains a "Gang of Four" reference, complete with a thorough description of who the "Gang of Four" are and what the "Gang of Four" did and all the various reasons why you should run out and buy the "Gang of Four's" book instead of this one. By the fourth captioned pull-quote I just wanted to strangle the editor for allowing this to go to press. Once is enough, thank you.
Rating:  - Best PHP Book I've Come Across
If you want to take your PHP coding up to the next level (object oriented), this is the book for you. It has become my primary source for PHP object design concepts.
Rating:  - Nice succinct treatment of PHP OOP
This book is a great theory book for intermediate to advanced PHP. It skips over beginning PHP syntax and dives straight into OOP. The book is divided into 3 main parts - Object-Oriented Programming, Design Patterns, and Practice.
The OOP part of the book is a thorough covering of OOP from a PHP angle. It spends a little time discussing procedural vs. OO code, but assumes the reader is already convinced of the merits of OOP. It covers all the most important PHP OO ground quickly, but still explains each part in good detail - from the basics of Classes, Objects, and Inheritance up to and including OO design decisions, Polymorphism, and UML. This part of the book is, IMO, worth the purchase price for the succinct yet thorough coverage of PHP-slanted Object-Oriented Programming.
Part 2 of the book is a bit more verbose, as the subject content demands. It introduces the idea of Design Patterns first and goes over some design pattern principles. Then it jumps into the low-level design patterns for handling objects and their relationships, and representing tasks as objects. The last chapter in this part is called "Enterprise Patterns" but it somehow fails to adequately cover the King of Compound Design Patterns - MVC. The "Enterprise Patterns" are instead a PHP translation of a few J2EE design patterns. While this part of the book is very useful for solid PHP programmers beginning to approach Design Patterns, it is theory-heavy and shouldn't be used as a reference point for implementation of the patterns.
The last part of the book covers some useful PHP tools like PEAR, phpDocumentor, CVS and Phing. While these are all good tools, I was disappointed not to see Subversion or PHPUnit covered in more detail.
Each part of the book could be read independently of the others. It is a great theory book, but its ad-hoc and highly-specific code examples make it less useful as a reference. It's easy-to-read and concise style through-out mean you can simply read thru it to quickly and easily learn the theory without a computer on-hand, which is very helpful, too.
Rating: - Great resource
This is a great resource for learning the Object oriented aspects of PHP and how to use the various design patterns. I have learned a lot of useful information using this book.
Rating: - Good place to start
Great book, I wish that there was a little more time spent on the first two sections (Patterns and Practice) as I am already familiar with and use the tools presented in the latter chapters. If you are new to working with PHP5 in a more serious development environment and want to expand your skills beyond just creating web pages then this book is worth a look.
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