Good Introduction to PHP.

I have been looking for a good introductory book on PHP for quite sometime now. "Spring into PHP' does give a good foundation on the subject for beginners. The basic concepts such as, operators, stings, emails, and functions are all there. Most of the other PHP books I have seen go right to more advanced concepts without introducing the basics needed to complete more advanced tasks. "Spring into PHP" is a good book if you need to learn PHP fast, but don't expect to learn the finer details of PHP. This book is probably just designed to give you a basic understanding of the PHP so you can go into a PHP file and have an idea what is going on. Even though the book illustrates the basic concepts of PHP very effectively, I wish there were more real-world examples. The chapter on communicating with a database is fine in teaching the concepts of adding, deleting, and inserting information into a database. However, the examples given for manipulating information in the database are given right in the code. In the real world you would enter the database information into text boxes. Overall, I wish some of the samples in this book stressed more interactivity.
Still, this is a great book for beginners who have little or no experience with PHP. It is certainly a better introductory learning tool than those huge PHP manuals that can have up to 1000 pages, which is great for professionals to reference, but not for beginners to reference. For this reason, I believe "Spring into PHP" would be an effective text book for an introductory php class.

Other Reviews

• Clear, concise and thorough. I love it.
• Good Introduction to PHP.
• Watch out-typos Galore!
• Hands Down