Rating:  - Lot's of headache for a beginner.
The book makes you copy a lot of code every chapter and then explains some of it. The code given has typos that cause errors you have to figure out by yourself. It also has some logical mistakes that was a lot harder to solve. For me as an absolute beginner these were challenging.
The book was written by several different people and they use slightly different code. One example is to connect to the mysql server they use either $link or $connect variable. Now I understand that the name of the variable doesn't matter, but it was confusing at the first place and the book is full of confusing stuff like this one.
It also introduces you to sophisticated programming concepts early on. I felt these shouldn't be for beginners.
I learned the most by figuring out the book's mistakes though. I also liked the exercises at the end of the chapters. The book also gives you links to current websites and the PHP community. I really needed these where the book was hard to comprehend.
After all I can say I can build websites now. But if you are a total novice then be prepared for lots of annoying error messages. You will need your patience towards the book.
Rating:  - Great Web development book for the beginner and intermidiate user
Hi,
I work as an ISP development staff member and from time to time write monitoring tools for our support team.
I wanted to start learning php in order to add some web interfaces to our tools.
I have found this book a very good book for the php/mysql beginner like me, great for the fact that it deals also with the installation part and even gives you all the php modules/commands you can use.
the interaction with mysql is also great from the begining and you start develop your skills using these 2 great tools.
one thing I would like to see is interaction with the system, with the exec commands for example.
beside that, this book is great.
Rating:  - Excellent Book
In the first few pages of this book, the new user of PHP, Apache, MySQL for web development gets a fast track into getting a server up and running fast, took me about 30 minutes. The remainder of the book is an excellent reference, with step by step howtos. This book brings the difficulty of getting a webserver running down to a level that brings success.
Rating: - Book that inspired new ideas
This book presents a really good practical guidance to those who need a quick track in to AMP technology. It gives you a complete view on how all three components interact each other. It is nice to have some programming experience to better understand the projects that authors develop in front of your eyes in seamless and elegant way. And programming approach utilized with these projects could be easily crafted for your own needs. I believe it is a right way to get educated with the AMP by reading the books like given one.
The material is well-laid with the exclusion of one case where pictures 16-4 and 16-5 were just disordered, though it is obvious and not really confusing.
I like the book and keep it as a reference for a while.
Rating: - Not for Me
I initially bought this book because it was the only book in the store that delved right in and immediatly began giving tools to use in a website. Most other books, at the time, seemed to acedemic with much to much theory. However, after reading the majority of this book, I realized that I really didn't learn much of anything. The book spits out large chunks of code and tries to explain parts of it but it doesn't explain other areas that I guess the authors just expect you to figure out on your own.
While this book did give me some basic tools and some decent code (the code is actually very good in this book), I didn't learn enough through out the book to really expand on it.
I returned this book, purchased "PHP and MYSQL Web Development(THIRD EDITION)" by Luke Welling/Laura Thomson, and havn't looked back. I guess, for me, a book that takes a slightly more acedemic approach isn't all bad after all.
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