I purchased this book to learn something about both PHP and MySQL. At this time I have read about 200 pages which covers all of PHP and most of the MySQL. It is easy to read. I have not come across any glaring errors. I also have not had time to try the examples although they seem clear enough.

The focus of the book is building web sites as the title implies. I want to use these tools to build a stand-alone application that creates and uses a database. It appears that every thing I need is in the book. It tells you how to connect to the database from PHP, how to create and manage tables, how to manipulate the data in the tables. It even gives a brief introduction to the normalization of your tables.

I am very happy with the book for my goals.
Rating: 5 / 5

This is an outstanding book if you have a background in programming C++ as I do. It is clear, concise and can be used as a reference book.

I used another book to get started and soon tired of the tedious copying and testing code. This book does not spend inordinate amount of time explaining each keystroke (exaggeration) and you can skim the parts you know and spend more time on the subject matter that you need to learn.

I highly recommend it.
Rating: 5 / 5

I am really wondering who are the people they gave the book 4-5 stars…

This book is full of typo error, bug coding, wrong concepts by the following facts:

1. He propose a fingerprint concept, but actually fingerprint needs to be sent back to the user via other ways. The author makes the reader to assume that he can only md5 the user agent with a seed variable and store that in $_Session varialbe to make every work. Wrong!! Totally wrong, nobody will know your fingerprint if you don’t send them back to the visitor, and it is meaningless.

2. The book really piss me off. It looks that the book was written by somebody who don’t know PHP …almost every two pages has a typo error, or even more… a script full of bugs….I read it totally once and take notes in every page, and after my reading, I start to try every code which I think is important, but I am really dispointed that they all are junk codes…and the author gave a lot of wrong concepts…for example, the chapter 5, using prev, next, current to handle array. He said if the next element in the array is (bool)False, the next function will end up. I tried it, and the author is wrong again.

It’s really time-wasting in reading this kind of book. Not only waste your money, but also waste your time.
Rating: 1 / 5

The way that the author guide you through this book is excelent.

Don’t hope so much for MySQL but it’s an excelent beginning, so clear and always in focus..

The last exercises are really very interesting, but I recommend that follow them very carefully becouse they need some adjusts to work! but that’s the idea or not?
Rating: 5 / 5

I looked in several books regarding this subject and think this is the best book about PHP/Mysql. I just read the first chapter because I am presently too busy with adobe Actionscript. Hope have time soon to continue it.
Rating: 5 / 5