I reach for this book when I want to get up to speed on something about PHP 5 quickly. With it, I can start coding and seeing results right away. The book covers a range of topics, the practicality of which can be best appreciated when you are faced with a real life project. For example, pp. 660-665 in Chapter 27, "Practical Database Queries", covers creating paged output (that is, spreading query results across several web pages) and listing page numbers which was just the thing I wanted to learn last night. My wife's database needs that sort of output. You can download Gilmore's example code and quickly start using it and then applying the lessons learned to build your own code.
This book is geared to people who want to get their hands on real code, wring the juice from it, make mistakes with it, learn all they can from it, and then tap out fresh code that does the same things with a little more oomph. Such people do not like long, dreary tracts of reading before being able participate in the elusive action. It is a good learning format because the only useful way to learn programming is to dive right in and do it. The book is a blend of brief discussion and quick code snippets with the expected results shown right away. This is a very good way to learn programming.
The section on SOAP, starting on page 450, makes me realize I had better experiment with this interesting technology. I'd certainly like to be able to find the temperature for a given postal code -- and other things of greater interest. Chapters 12, "PHP Authentication", 14, "Networking With PHP", and 15, "PHP and LDAP", look into core internet services that every programmer should know how to exploit, but too often don't. For example I've learned how to authenticate a user with LDAP.
The author, W. Jason Gilmore, is cheerful and most helpful in his responses to reader inquiries. He responded quickly to my questions and I am impressed with his ability to courteously point me in the right direction.
Be sure to download Gilmore's example code. There are 30 chapters worth of programming stuffed into that zip file.
The book has a few rough edges. The most obvious is that some sentences are a little wordy. That's all right, you can move on to the next paragraphs, and will soon be trying out a new example. I wish Jason had discussed MySQL 4.1 and the mysqli interface, especially since there are other books around that cover MySQL 4.0.x. Perhaps if he had added another chapter to cover that? We can always look forward to a second edition.
This book should be near every serious programmer's desk. You, dear reader, will reach for it a surprising amount of the time.
