I've been using this book for the past few business weeks. Yes, weeks.

First and foremost, this book is extremely well written, well cited, and clear. Examples are concise, and it rarely leaves you floundering to understand a topic. The ideas are presented in a logical order, proceed clearly, and generally, consist of helpful hints and instructions.

UNFORTUNATELY, all of the code in this book is pretty much worthless. Every bit of it is outdated, and in the 134 pages of the book that I have suffered through, I have had major problems at every step. From having major issues with integrating PEAR (installation has completely changed since the writing of this book, and the major database functions it uses have changed, and the documentation in the book and on the PEAR website are not clear on this), to having to track down irregular and outdated code, not a single feature has been implemented easily or correctly on the first attempt (even ignoring any errors that I made myself due to my inexperience).

I have wasted hours on this book, thinking that it will eventually get to the point where I'm not running into compatibility issues. This may end up being the case, but taking several business days (2.5 weeks invested in just this book) worth of my time to get through 134 pages (mainly spent debugging and perusing forums to find solutions) is just not worth it.

I will be buying the second edition, and I hope that it fixes these issues.

It's really a shame, because the theory in this book is truly awesome. Implementing it, however, is a nightmare, especially for a beginner.

I've read, and enjoyed, other books by Cristian Darie. This book is no different. This book shows how to use PHP 5 and the Smarty framework to produce an E-Commerce site. The Smarty framework is a good choice for PHP developers seeking to implement a good template. This book fills a gap by being a good introduction to this framework as well.

If you are not familiar with Smarty, the following description is from their web site:

Smarty is a template engine for PHP. More specifically, it facilitates a manageable way to separate application logic and content from its presentation. This is best described in a situation where the application programmer and the template designer play different roles, or in most cases are not the same person.

This book guides you as the author develops an advanced E-Commerce system. Think of something such as Amazon, complete with product reviews, customer and catalog management. Once the user is finished reading the book they are left with working catalog order system that they can modify to suit their needs. Or completely create their own similar system.

The table of contents for the book follows:

Chapter 1: Starting an E-Commerce Site
Chapter 2: Laying Out the Foundations
Chapter 3: Creating the Product Catalog: Part I
Chapter 4: Creating the Product Catalog: Part II
Chapter 5: Searching the Catalog
Chapter 6: Receiving Payments using PayPal
Chapter 7: Catalog Administration
Chapter 8: The Shopping Basket
Chapter 9: Dealing with Customer Orders
Chapter 10: Product Recommendations
Chapter 11: Customer Details
Chapter 12: Implementing the Order Pipline: Part I
Chapter 13: Implementing the Order Pipeline: Part II
Chapter 14: Credit Card Transactions
Chapter 15: Product Reviews
Chapter 16: Connecting to Web Services

I have purchased a multitude of books from Amazon over the years. However, I have never written a book review, no matter how bad the book turned out to be. But, there is always a first time. This is one of the worst - if not the worst - tech books I have ever read, and with over 25 years of Engineering and Software development experience I have read a lot of books.

Now I know why Apress doesn't let you look inside their books on the Amazon website before you purchase. If they did there might not be an Apress at all. First, there is nothing "novice" about this book. Second, you had better know how to use Smarty, and I mean use it well. Don't rely on the Smarty website documentation to help and there are not many definitive books on the subject either. I only found one title devoted to Smarty on Amazon and that would cost another 39.99.

I typically like to review books in the local bookstore and take a gander at Amazon "reviews" before purchase. However, I couldn't find the book locally (which should have told me something) and I failed to pay proper attention to the reviews, i.e., take a look at Michael Brand's review. The editorial book review doesn't even mention Smarty which is a major part of this book.

This book reviews at 4.5 stars. From this, I can only assume the large majority of those reviewing the book work at Apress or are kin to the authors. After the first three chapters I was seeing stars. Don't be suckered in to buying this book unless you are thoroughly familiar with Smarty.

So, if your an experienced -not novice- php/mysql programmer and Smarty wizard, and love to read(and debug) code with little useful explanatory info, then by all means buy this book. Oh, did I mention it makes a great coaster for coffee?

JC.

I dont usually spend time writting this stuff, and when i did it, it was not for good reasons. But this time, i'm really really really happy about the material in the book, it not only teaches you about the code, it get depth really depth in how you must implement, think, best practices, and a lot of things that even if you are an experienced programer havent thought about.
If i could give the book 10 stars, i would.

This book really helped me start my site. I was new to php and databases at the time, and I always learn best by example. By the time I finished the book, I had way more examples than I needed -- and a skeleton for my site.