“Professional PHP Programming, ISBN 1-861002-96-3, available
from Wrox Press, list price $49.99, has a bad title. It really
does. Professional. Professional what? Professional PHP
Programming? Huh? From this point on, I will refer to this
book as A Formatted Version of the PHP Reference Manual!
Truly, there is little information in this book that is not
available in the standard PHP documentation besides some fancy
formatting and page numbers (Oh, let’s not forget about the
author’s mugs on the front cover!).”
“Chapters 1-3 are a real sleeper. They read like the README and
INSTALL files that come with the PHP standard Unix distribution.
The scope of these chapters goes far outside the realm of README
and INSTALL, however. … Chapters 4-11 contain the usual
introduction to programming languages. … The rest of the chapters
are ho hum.”
“Aside from being very disappointed by the title, this book
does make a good reference manual. If you don’t know PHP, read the
first 13 chapters and save the rest for later. If you do, don’t get
the book until a new edition that thoroughly covers PHP4 is
released.”