this is a good book, good review of the php4 language, but useless if you want to get a PHP5 certification.

I buy the book cause i want to make the certification on PHP5 so i wasted my money...

Could help if the title of the book specify the language version.

This book was a good overview, but be careful. There are numerous mistakes in the book and on the "practice" tests. Not that his book will even be worth anything since the PHP4 test will no longer be given in a month, but if it's any indicator of what the PHP5 book is like I recommend you use more then one source of study material. Certain topics that are in the test were very briefly covered in the book, but I had two or three questions on it. I would recommend the cert course through Zend if you are worried about your knowledge.

When studying for a technical certification exam, there are two things that you must do. The first is to achieve the appropriate level of expertise and the second is to become familiar with the forms that the questions may take. Questions on technical examinations can be very tricky, a common cause of failure is to misread or misinterpret the question. Programming is such a precise activity that it is easy to write a question where the "obvious" answer is in fact wrong.
While this book does have some description of how to program in PHP, it is a review only and there is not enough to impart the appropriate level of expertise in PHP. A small number of sample questions are given at the end of each chapter and there is a sample exam with eighteen questions at the end. Solutions to all of the questions are included.
Although I found the study questions to be good, my personal opinion is that there are not enough of them. It would have been better if there were at least fifty questions in a sample exam, or two exams with at least fifty. When providing study questions, overkill is difficult to impossible to achieve, and eighteen is nowhere near that lofty goal.

I just took and passed the the test today and read this book cover to cover twice. I think it is a great book, but it seemed that the book's questions were a lot harder then the exams.

Coming from "The PHP Company", I fully expected this book to be "up-to-snuff" on everything it covered. I was sadly mistaken.

I barely made it past the third page of the first chapter, and I had to shelf it. The technical errors, the grammatical errors (I know, I'm not perfect), and the cheesey analogies all made it a very uncomfortable experience.

As another reviewer mentioned, this book needs to be updated to reflect the errata and such. I'm very displeased with it, and I will be sharing my opinion with Zend.