This book looked great until I tried to use it to learn PHP. When I bought it, the alternative was one other book (Leon Atkinson's Core PHP, I think) which appeared to be nothing but a printed copy of the online manual.
I've spent three days trying to figure out whether the PHP at my ISP, the MySQL at my ISP, the way I have everything arranged at my site, my own thickheadedness, or the book is the reason I can't use Medinets' code to connect from inside HTML. It just doesn't work. Telnet works fine, but that has limited use....
His examples and exercises assume you have a local Apache Server and local MySQL. Since the whole point of PHP is that it gives you remote server-side database "for free," this seems a bit wrong-headed. And it makes "dipping into a new technology" a bit pricey; although Unix MySQL is free, the cost of developing for the vagaries of Windows is such that the Windows version must be purchased. Another reviewer has argued persuasively that even the Linux installation is significantly more complex than Medinets makes it sound, and that the book glosses over and even fails to mention some crucial installation tweaks.
With your own local server and database, there is a significant characteristic that Medinet fails to discuss: you are automatically a superuser, with full privileges. At an ISP, one is more likely to be a limited user, which is not a problem if you have a responsive ISP, but it means that almost every example in Medinets' book has to be filtered.
I emailed David Medinets to get some help with this problem, and hopefully to be pointed to some errata files for the code, which does have some identifiable errors. His response was that he "didn't have any experience with remote MySQL." Wrong answer. I just purchased WROX's Professional PHP.
