As an experience programmer from ASP.Net, I can say that this is a good book for getting into PHP. The book paces pretty well, making sure you get the necessary basics but not bore you with overstuffed material.

The only thing that annoys me, is the amount of typos on the samples and sample codes. If you are a seasoned programmer like me, you will pick them up with no problem before testing them. But for the novice, it could give them extra time debugging.

Still I recommend this book.

I have had bad luck with the core series of books in the past, they are in desperate need of both a copywriter/spellchecker, and technical fact checker. However this was a very pleasant surprise - it suffered from neither of the above mentioned problems . the author covered topics most other books cover i.e., Unicode handling, Security, and his explanation of OOP in PHP is the best I have ever read.

I would recommend this book to anyone planning to write PHP.

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.

I don't write reviews unless I feel very strongly about the book. This is indeed the first time I wrote in amazon.com.
I feel this is the one book you must have for web application development using PHP and mySQL, although frankly there are many good ones around too. I have seen many books and I strongly recommend this.
It has a comprehensive coverage. Many reviews have mentioned it so I am not going to repeat. I find that I learned something not covered in other books - about building robust, secured, and efficient codes. I have not seen people write that kind of codes for PHP. Marc has been most generous in shraring these with the readers. The 3 last projects were superb. It is well suited for the techie.

For a recent project that I needed to build I had to dive into PHP and MySQL. I have purchased quite a few books on the subject matter. A books real value to me is how much the book is used after you finish reading it. This is one of those books that has just enough to get you going on most PHP topics. With the help of this book and a couple of others I have been able to build a complex CMS system. This is the best of the bunch.