PHP 5 Power Programming is the ideal introduction to PHP 5 for those who are already familiar with the PHP language. This book, written by some of the best known in the world of PHP, brings together all of the new and powerful features that PHP 5 has to offer, from polymorphism and interfaces to SQLite and SOAP. Anyone who knows PHP 4 and are wanting to make the change to PHP 5 would benefit from the "Making the Move" chapter. Watch out beginners, while the book does offer a "Basic Language" chapter, it isn't designed to introduce new programmers to the language. Those who are familiar with similar programming languages may be able to learn PHP from this short chapter, however don't expect the rest of the book to stop and wait for you.

PHP 5 Power Programming succeeds in showing the new features of PHP. The principle addition to PHP is the improvement of OOP. This book dedicated two chapters to introduce PHP 5's Object Orientated language and makes a fine job of simplifying something which appears complicated even to an experienced programmer. If you ever wanted someone to make sense of what PHP 5's OOP can accomplish, this book delivers it without fail. One of my personal favourites about this book is Chapter 5. Unlike the myriads of other PHP books, Chapter 5 actually deals with real life situations, such as file uploads and basic (but important!) file architecture. This chapter deals with the problems faced with cookies and sessions, and provides an excellent way around them. By the time you reach Chapter 6, you could be wondering what's left to be learned. The answer? Lots. So sit back and enjoy the journey through PHP 5, your in the hands of very experienced authors.

Not only does this book provide you with the "definitive introduction to PHP 5's advanced features" it also includes an extended 90-day trial of Zend Studio - the ideal Development Environment for PHP. This may make it a tempting purchase for programmers who are new to PHP. Even if the back cover encourages new developers to buy this book, I would strongly recommend against doing so. Chapter 2 does help set down the basics, but be prepared to take the plunge as Chapter 3 goes straight into OOP. If you're new to PHP and sure about choosing this book, I would suggest skipping both Chapters 3 and 4, head into Chapter 5 and see how the language should be used to the best of its ability.

PHP 5 Power Programming by Andi Gutmans (co-creator, PHP 5), Stig Saether Bakken (PHP core team member, creator of PEAR) and Derick Rethans (PHP contributor and the PHP QA team leader) is the perfect purchase for PHP developers wishing to bring their skills and programs into a new level. This book wastes no time in getting stuck into the advanced new features of PHP 5 and soon you'll be putting a big of reflection into all of your code. While not ideal for beginners, anyone who has experience with languages such as C, Perl or Java will find themselves understanding PHP in no time.

If you're already writing PHP and want to hone your skills, this is the book for which you've been searching. Bring a highlighter because you will want to go back for quick references since the book is packed with so much good information.

If you don't write code and think OOP is a sound you make when you drop something, you will never have to buy another book as it will take you a lifetime to finish this one.

This book is one of those rarities in computer-book industry that are actually worth reading and a place in your bookshelf. The authors do an excellent job at uncovering what lies beneath the hood, so to speak. The first few chapters are a great refresher for those of us who come from a different programming language background. The intorduction to OO programming and patterns is one of the best I've read coming from a non-academic source. Thereafter is when the real substance surfaces. Showing how to take full advantage of not only PHP5's OO, but also of the C-based Zend engine and PEAR modules. The chapters on database connectivity are absolutely outstanding. The book is well written, and in some parts goes down to the time and space complexity and also the data structures used by the engine. Very good book overall. The only reason I did not give five stars to this excellent primer is because I found at least five or six typographical errors in the first few chapters. Not a big deal, just a matter of personal preference.
A must for PHP power developers.

The title says it all for power programmers if you are new to the php world and web applications in general getting into this book may be tough. Ok, they have a whole chapter devoted for the basics but its not a tutorial for you to learn how to do php the main focus of this book is the new object oreintation in php5 and it goes indepth with pear it allows you to really take your website application scheme and shows you what you can do with the php5 it now has a database built in with it but again for those of you who may want to read this book to learn the basics it may not be for you it requires that you have a fairly wide knowledge base of programming in general php is basically the best of all kinds of programming languages as the authors put it. There are some good examples for web applications but I think that they could probably have a site with the tutorials or a cd with php5 on it compiled differently for those different types of unix. Coming from the people who had for the most part created php it s a solid book could have gone through some more proof reads as I saw some mistakes which is just the critically anal side of me showing but I think it would be a good book to read if you have dealt with the php world before and are wanting more about the newest verion then go for it but if are just wanting to learn try something else

OK, so you've created your first web page with PHP and MySQL and it's all right--it does what you want--but you want something more. Something in there is lacking. You've been searching for the best way to get your object-oriented applications working properly, or you need to find a better way to assimilate your data graphically for your boss and the only computer technology he understands is the World Wide Web. Welcome to the world of power programming with the latest version of PHP.

One of the latest books in the Prentice Hall's Bruce Perens' Open Source Series is this one called "PHP 5 Power Programming." Written by Andi Gutmans, the lead PHP 5 designer, Stig Saether Bakken, the creator of PEAR, and Derick Rethans, a key PHP contributor, this book is a self-proclaimed tome of wonders which contains insights into all the key features of the latest version of PHP and the keys to unlocking all its wholesome goodness.

After spending a little time showing the evolution of PHP, the authors dive right in. They only devote a brief introduction to the basics of PHP. Clearly, if all you've done is convert a six-line BASH script into PHP, you might check out a less involved reference first. You're expected to be tired with the PHP basics already when you dive into this work, because it's barely a chapter gone before you start getting involved in advanced constructs like iterators, object polymorphism, overloading and exception handling. The best part is the authors never leave you floundering about a simple topic just because they're in the midst of a complicated one. They never let you forget how to unset a cookie, while explaining all of the safeguards necessary to maintain a safe operating environment for a published Web application.

Some of the topics that can be found in this very involved book are: stucturing and designing Web applications, integration with MySQL for data storage and recovery, working with the GD libraries for extensive graphical manipulation, and a detailed discussion and reference on PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository, which does for PHP what CPAN does for Perl. There are also sections with great insite into using PHP with XML and SOAP, regular expressions and streams. And there's even a detailed chapter towards the back about benchmarking your PHP performance and enhancing its operation. Three appendices provide information on the packages available through PEAR and PECL, the phpDocumentor application and Zend Studio.

For a technical manual, this book is surprisingly well laid out. You can use the index in the back to find the topic of your interest, but just skimming through reveals that everything is put where you can find it. Reading the book cover to cover works well also. I doubt the average reader will skip over much as this reference is chock full of good information and written with a style that keeps the reader interested, even if it's a topic he might already be familiar with.

For anyone who already has the fundamentals of PHP in pocket, but wants to get into the nuts and bolts of the new version and explore all of the depth and richness of some of its advanced features, this book is definitely a keeper. At 689 pages, it's long enough to contain a treasure trove of information, but short enough not to turn anyone away by its sheer volume. The best part is, all of this information is straight from the guys who know it best, so you can be sure that all of the best tips are included. And by the end of the book it's clear that PHP has evolved a great deal more robustness than it's original title and function of hypertext preprocessor had likely ever imagined.

If you're going to start off learning to build database driven web sites today, you probably want to use LAMP. LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Each of these technologies is complex enough that a dedicated book, and this book is THE BOOK for PHP. Having said that, I need to add that this is not a book intended for the beginner. It is intended for people already working in PHP 4 to upgrade their skills up to PHP 5. It is written by the people largely responsible for bringing PHP to the state it is today. They know whereof they speak. To be sure there are chapters at the beginning of the book that provide a basic introduction, but they are a bit terse when compared to the typical beginners level book.

So what are the new features that this book is particularly designed to cover: The basic underlying structure of the language has been changed for more object orientation. This fits into the concepts of more recently designed languages. Yes, Martha, PHP is definitely a language. The next most important part of the upgrade is greatly improved support for producing and parsing XML code. While there are many more changes, these are the major.

One of the authors of the book, Stig Bakken, is the creator of PEAR (PHP Extension and Application Repository). There are three chapters discussing PEAR. PEAR is itself a fairly complex language, so this serves as an introduction to give you enough information to know if this is for you.

Summary: An excellent book for the intermediate level PHP programmer who wants to move up. A bit imposing for a beginner.

So why is PHP so popular? Here, the authors demonstrate strongly why this is so, using the latest version, PHP 5. The book walks through a full explanation of the syntax. If you already know C++, Java or C#, things will be very straightforward.

Though, strangely, PHP is deficient in some simple aspects. For example, imagine you have a for loop. The syntax of this is essentially the same as in the other languages. But any loop invariant is recomputed in each pass of the loop. Whereas those languages would implicitly precompute it. In PHP you have to explicitly precompute it into a temporary variable, and then use that variable in the for. Why PHP has this constraint is not explained in the book. But at least you get the workaround.

Most of the book covers using PHP in common applications. Especially in making a website with MySQL for the back end database. There are several books devoted to just this combination. But this book gives you enough to implement a good first case of it.

Reasonably experience web or PHP engineers will like this book. The PHP language introduction at the beginning is a brief seventy pages which sets the tone for the rest of the book; fast and concise.

After the first three chapters that introduce PHP there is an excellent chapter on design patterns. From there he heads into PHP application design in another solid chapter that effectively mixes code and illustrations to demonstrate best practices.

I found some fault in the database chapter that follows. He shows the use of string substitution in building SQL queries. This is never ever a good idea because the database access is slow and more importantly, vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. He fixes it though by showing proper use of replacement operators with the section on PEAR.

The heart of the book, which I believe is the first seven chapters, finishes of with a strong chapter on exception handling. The chapters that follow cover XML, regular expressions, file I/O, and graphics. The regular expressions chapter is very good.

There are chapters on installing and configuring PHP and PEAR. There is also a very good chapter on extending PHP with C.

In the appendices are some reference sections. In particular there is a listing of PEAR modules that is handy, but not particularly well organized. I would have much rather have had the modules organized into groups of related technologies.

There is room for improvement. There could be more illustrations, and the text could use some more exposition. But this is a solid book that will be valuable for PHP programmers looking to flesh out their knowledge of the platform.