Background: My programming background is C though I haven’t done any “real” programming since 1989. I took a PHP/MySQL course through a community college as it would give me the structure to learn the material.

Ugh, this book is painful. Apparently some folks are learning to program for the first time in PHP – I couldn’t think of a worse environment excepts perhaps assembler. This being case, can not recommend this text to learn programming and PHP. I’m week 6 into a 16 week course and dislike this text. There are typos in it. Not so bad if you have a programming background and realize that the text is in error but if you are a beginning programming student and trust the text to be correct, you’ll go nuts chasing down your errors all the while your “standard” is in error.

For experienced folks, the PHP and MySQL nuggets are buried within pages of texts. Have not found it possible to use the book as a reference as in “I think I remember a function that …’ and then look it up in the text. If you use the index, you’ll be pointed to a couple of pages of text that you’ll eventually find the function you’re looking for but usually it isn’t broken out.

Bottom line: As the back of the text says, “PHP Programming with MySQL is the latest addition to the Web Warrior series.” Ugh, if this text is like the rest of Web Warrior series, don’t use these soldiers as you’ll lose the war.
Rating: 2 / 5

I had to buy this book for a class I’m taking.

This book has too many mistakes, including typos, grammar errors, incorrect wording, errors in opinion, and errors regarding rules about how the code will compile.

This book needs someone to edit it and another person to check the validity of what is written and make corrections where needed.

It’s a shame that it was published with so many bugs. Hopefully, the next version will be better. But even then, at $70 a copy the price is too high.
Rating: 1 / 5

It seems like a fairly thorough text on all the various aspects of PHP. How would one know, however, unless one studies another book along side? One major flaw which is very serious: there are typographical errors in coding examples AND explanatory texts. For a programming language that is an unacceptable feature. As a learner, one is dependent on the text being correct. Another pedagogical shortcoming is that some of the exercises ask the user to type in a block of code with mistakes in it. Then it asks the user to correct them. Personally I think that gives the user the opportunity to learn bad coding practice.
Rating: 2 / 5

Unless you are required to buy this book for a class, I would save the 75+ bucks. There is very little detailed information in here, and the most extensive sections are the exercises at the end of each chapter. There are many other books out there for a fraction of the price that will serve as reference volumes long after you’ve gotten everything you can possibly get out of this one (check out O’Reilly press). All of these “Course Technology” editions by Thompson/Cengage are so pretty to look at on your bookshelf, but so lacking in useful content. Good info for someone with little or no programming experience, but even then – just not worth the price. Unfortunately many of us college students are like sitting ducks to these publishers, easy targets for their marketing scams.
Rating: 2 / 5

This was one of the assigned books for a class of mine, but I quite liked it. As a teacher and a programmer of ~25 yrs, I like a book that I can not only read from front to back, but one in which I can easily ‘look things up’, since I often know how to do something in another language but want to see how it is done with this tool.

This book is clear and concise and fills both needs. I liked the fact that it talks not only about the languages PHP and MySQL, but also how to get started with them (installation, configuration, and use with HTML). This book, along with the XAMPP/PHP/MySQL toolset made learning very easy and immediate.

One suggestion I’d make, however, would be for the book to include the XAMPP/PDT-all-in-one eclipse/Zend Debugger toolchain. Particularly on Windows, this allows the student to do open-source-package command-line debugging that is painless and accurate. Once I figured out how to use these tools, creating and debugging the book examples was ‘a breeze’. It could have saved a lot of time for DG to include this industry-standard toolset. Kudos to Gosselin, though, for a great book… jps
Rating: 4 / 5