I was swayed to buy this book instead of the O'Reilly book because the reviews were all great and the book looked decent. The level of coverage is what I was looking for and both books were geared towards experienced programmers who want to get past the basics quickly. That summarizes what I like about the book.
However, the more I read, the less impressed I have become. As an experience programmer I keep noticing examples and descriptions of things that most experienced programmers wouldn't do. Here are a few examples:
* Examples use extensions like .inc and .class even though he describes the security issues with these extensions. If you copy the examples without reading this sidebar you might be doing yourself a misservice.
* The example demonstrating inheritance is a case where you probably shouldn't use inheritance. In other words, it's a technically correct example but probably not a good design. People who learn by example may learn bad habits.
* Also in the inheritance example, he includes both the inherited class and base class files in the file that uses the inherited class. I think most experienced programmers would have made the inherited class include the base class definition so the programmer only needs to include the class they are dealing with.
I may be nitpicking a bit and this book might turn out to be a decent reference. However I find myself taking everything with a grain of salt after seeing these types of subtle misteps. From an advanced book I expect a bit more.
Bottom line: I wish I had bought the O'Reilly book (though I haven't reviewed it so you should do your own comparisons).
