This is a great book covering a lot of the advanced features of PHP and how to use them in your scripts. There are a lot of examples and this books teaches a lot about OOP and various design patterns. This book is very well written and easy to understand.

I have read the review below by P. N. Payne about the paid reviews. Immediately, I checked on the "See All My Reviews" link for Herrington, Boudville, and Matlock. Here's what I found:
Herrington: Reviewed 20 books on March 8th (no exaggeration), ranging from "RFID Essentials" (whatever that means), "Web site Cookbook", "Open GL", to "Degunking Your Home". Suspiciously, almost all of these reviews got 5 stars, where the pros stated are almost identical to those stated by the publisher, and the cons are really funny ones, such as "I would have liked full color throughout".
W Boudville: Reviewed 15 books on March 15th, including "Nanoelectronics and Nanosystems : From Transistors to Molecular and Quantum Devices", "The Origins of Cauchy's Rigorous Calculus (Dover Books on Mathematics)", "The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors", "Natural Resources and Violent Conflict: Options and Actions", and of course "Computational Geometry in C (Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science)". This guy usually gives all his books 4 starts. I think he's playing it safer than Herrington.
John Matlock: This guy reviewed 11 books on March 15th. Apparently, he read the "Handbook of Parallel Computing and Statistics", "Practical Poser 6", "The Rock from Mars : A Detective Story on Two Planets", "Carrara 5 Pro Handbook", "Beginning Visual C# 2005", "The Glorious Cause : The American Revolution, 1763-1789", and of course a book about marketing, seeing how marketing relates to the American revolution, C#, Carrara, Astronomy, Posing, and Statistics. Matlock opts for the 5 stars on all his reviews.
Now about this book, I'm buying it, because I read some excerpts in the library and I think it's great, not because of the rating of these guys. My 5 stars are given for the book, and the people who wrote the book, but certainly not for the publisher. Now I'm not against anyone making a quick buck, but I'm certainly against people getting paid for misleading others. I think Amazon has a real challenge over here:
1. Review their rating system, raising an alarm when someone has a way above normal number of reviews/day.
2. Dealing with unethical publishers encouraging and paying for this trash, and I think this is the hardest challenge for Amazon.
I just hope that Amazon is not aware of this, which I really find it hard to believe.

Look behind the high star ratings, particularly those which come out right after a book prints. Ie: If the reviewer writes several reviews a day, and they are all high ratings, and you believe it, then you have just been scammed. Matlock writes up to 12 review a day, on all different kinds of books. 5 stars each. He actually reads 12 books including computer programming books in one 24 hour day plus has time to write and send 12 reviews? What ever happened to honesty? How much do these guy get paid for this garbage? This book may be outstanding, but you can not trust Matlock, Boudville, or Herrington to tell you that. Too bad, because my quick scan made me think it is a fairly good advanced PHP book.

I have purchased too many computer books based on these biased reviews, and feel like I have been cheated. This is a lousy way to treat your customers. Maybe CBS or NBC or Fox will expose this on national TV. One star for lack of honesty in paying for or participating in this scam.

I got this book after reading a rather poor intro on php 5 (Learning php5) and was rather pleased with the book.

I had no experience with php (well other than reading the other book) and found this book very accessible. The book gives you enough information to get started on php5 and the majority of its features. It even has information about writing your own php extensions. Although I really didn't find the all the Pear info that helpful.

I do really wish the book had more information on design patterns etc for php 5. It did go over a few but not ones that are particularly useful for building applications for the web. But I guess this is sort of the status of PHP, its still seems to be a sort of hacky scripting language.

I really enjoyed reading this book, and I did learn a good deal of things in the process. However this book covers a lot of topics, and because of that it doesn't get too in depth about any one subject. It mostly skims over many of the new OOP features of PHP5, and PEAR. Think of this book as a good resource for further web research.