I started with a good computer background but limited coding experience and no knowledge of PHP. I got this book. I looked at it for an hour. I started writing a php test site. I worked my way through the rest of the book in four hours. I worked on the site for the next two days. I got the Sam's PHP in 24 hours book. At the end of a week I had my own online photo management / backup / sharing application up and running.

For high yield learning I've never seen anything that can rival this book. It both told me how to do what I wanted, why to do it that way, and what not to do. Simply, this book is a wonderful starting point for someone who is tech savvy and wants to learn by doing.

Advice:
Buy it so it arrives on a Friday before a free weekend, you are going to kill the weekend. Go on and buy the Sam's teach yourself PHP in 24 hours now and save yourself the frustration of waiting for it to ship.

About Sam's
I was so happy with this Sam's book that I got PHP in 24 hours and the MySQL in 10 mins books to help with the same project. MySQL in 10 mins is also a great book. I didn't find it as good as PHP in 10 mins, but it's hard to say if that is a difference in the books of a difference in the two topics. (PHP in 24 is great, as I said earlier.)

Unfortunately those are really my only success stories with Sam's. I got both JavaScript in 24hrs and Ajax in 10 mins from Sam's and neither lived up to the PHP books. They were both much more of a cookbook feeling and less of an introduction to a topic.

I recently found a need to do a little PHP programming on a website. When I went looking for books what I found were any number of two to six hundred page texts. Then I found this little gem. It fitted my purposes perfectly as it explained the basics of PHP with examples for things I was trying to accomplish.

I will say that I that the treatment of classes was too brief and was the major reason that I didn't give five stars. The important things is that it provided a basis for me to experiment with the examples, accomplish what I needed to do, and allowed me to gain enough knowledge in a few short evenings that I'll be able to get another book on the subject without being totally lost from the first page. That is all I can ask from a cheap book.

This book was written in clear language with small examples of code that are perfect for a beginner to make learning PHP easy. The best thing is that the author chose an excellent set of topics to cover in an introductory book: programming concepts ( arrays, variables, functions, etc. ), web concepts ( forms, connecting to MySQL database, cookies and sessions, etc. ), and a smattering of installation and configuration information ( ... just enough, not boring ). Moreover, I really liked the smaller size of the book so that I could easily hold it while typing up the examples at my keyboard.

I'm still trying to learn PHP after going through this book. I have HTML, XHTML, actionscript, and CSS experience. It teaches interesting points about the language, but it's difficult to put the language into use with this book.

Chris Newman's Sams Teach Yourself PHP In 10 Minutes is Enthusiastically recommended as a thoroughly "user friendly", no-fluff, just-the-answers, step-by-step working guide to building dynamic websites using PHP. Broken down into 10-minute lessons, the novice will gain a rapid working knowledge of PHP 5 and be able to immediately put that knowledge to use in practical applications.