Rating:  - Probably not your best option
I bought this book because I need a more advanced book on PHP/MySQL - specifically in the use of mysqli, PDO and stored procedures. I found this book to be quite lacking in these areas. I have the MySQL Stored Procedure Programming book by Oreilly and it covers these subjects in better detail but even it doesn't go as in-depth as I would like.
I think there is some good material in this book but it didn't satisfy my immediate need and for that I am disappointed.
Rating:  - Hit or miss
Some sections of this book have been very helpful, while others seem to have been slapped together for "completeness" but without much thought or care. For example the section on session handling I thought was quite good. The section covering the newer object based MySQL interface was hard to understand and lacked enough information to do anything beyond the very basic example given. Then again most books on the shelves right now don't cover it at all.
I found numerous errors in the examples, but that seems to be standard fare for most rushed-to-print books of this type. A larger problem is that the text is often unclear, and the examples don't do a good job of helping. Also where there are multiple approaches given to a problem the examples seem to stick to one approach and other approaches, while mentioned, are not shown.
It's easy to accept these shortcomings as it seems to be the norm for this type of book, except that after spending some time looking through other books on the subject I did find one that does a much better job on all fronts. No surprise it's an O'Reilly release - "Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL 2nd Edition."
As to whether I'd recommend this book...not as a sole source of information. It does have some good sections that are worth having access to, but trying to use it by itself to learn with and as a reference has been an exercise in frustration.
Rating:  - good book
is a good book for reference, if you already have programimng knowledge is great, it has a lot of information so you can skip some parts, if you are new to php you have to read it from the start.
it was a good buy
Rating: - Definitely not for begginers
I never got around to finishing this book because halfway through it I noticed I had not even written a single line of code.The author does not propose any excercises for you to try out what your learned through the book.All he does is list all the functions available in PHP but no examples on how to use them.
I can see this book being useful as a reference after you have programmed PHP for a while, but for beginners that want to get started in PHP for the very firt time I would not recommend it.
Rating:  - Far too many typos, syntax errors, and gaps in explinations
I bought this book on recommendation. I have a background in programming, and I just needed a book to cement together all the concepts I had picked up in developing PHP apps. Less then 2 chapters in the errors became so frequent in the code that the author no longer holds my confidence. Its hard to be confident of his explanation if it lacks the care to make sure its correct.
The writing and explanations, though following a clear format, are at times wildly inconstant in explaining the parts of various functions. Do not recommend.
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