I love this book! You know how you sometimes get a little bugger of a problem while coding? Chances are you'll find a solution for it in here. This book has saved me countless hours while coding -- skip searching and get the solution right away. Plus I used a coupon from UnderTag.com, so it was almost free for me.

I am a newb when it comes to PHP, but not when it comes to programming in general. The Content is very cleanly laid out. It is straightforward, but by no means simple. For using some detailed code, I was surprised at the lack of commenting on the code. He steps into some areas not expected by me. For instance, he lays out some XML / XSL based code that I was itching to know and now I do!

However, he also covers some topics that are so basic that I felt it hurt the book overall... I learned most basic code from such books as Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 24 hours... so to cover the few basic topics like he did felt more appropriate for a beginners book... But he does make up for it with some VERY in-depth code. Just wish he commented his advanced code to help the newbs a little more...

If you're going to get a book to help you with specific issues? This is your book... (as long as your issues are his) If you want to learn PHP? Get Sams Teach Yourself PHP in 24 hours...

Either way, do yourself a favor and check out the Index here on Amazon... You might just find exactly what you are hoping to do, in which case, his coding is great...

we the owner of www.hiddenbrains.com are a leading php developer and solution provider, making e-commerce applications,web applications, developed more then 200 websites using php and mysql, we are allways using this book for our reference.
regards
jugal kishore chhawchharia
http://www.hiddenbrains.com

Like a true cookbook, this book gives you recipes for how to make certain meals. It doesn't explain every tool and ingredient in your kitchen: that information can be had anywhere.

The authors present several example projects, then go about solving them, introducing you to certain PHP fundementals (and not-so-fundamentals) along the way.

If you are trying to learn PHP from scratch, then maybe this isn't the book for you. This isn't "PHP Cooking for Dummies" ... and I, for one, am glad.

I'm not the type of programmer that likes to copy & paste other people's code in my applications, however, every so often I run into problems that I'm not quite sure of the proper way to solve; this book has become invaluable in these cases, whether it is performing HTTP Post requests (hint, use cURL), or parsing data with regular expressions, the book provides a handy reference for all the common and not so common tasks that you might encounter.

One of the things that I really appreciate about the book is that it is written by two PHP core developers, and they often show their knowledge, telling you what goes on behind the scene, offering a variety of different solutions, and then offering the best solution. I've found this information helpful in solving future problems, as I learned what was going on under the hood, therefore, I knew how to optimize the solution.

An excellent book, if you want solutions to problems that you'll constantly encounter, its meant to be a reference on the programmer's bookshelf, not a way to learn PHP (although it definitely has _improved_ my PHP knowledge), ....

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