Great Intermediate level PHP book

This is a fairly long book at 858 pages. It is well worth your time. It's well written and therefore, easy to read. Each section gives a detailed explanation, followed by a well commented code example. The index is extensive so it will serve as a good PHP and MySQL reference. The books layout also makes for easy reading. Each chapter, 33 in all, is just long enough to be read in a day, and covers its topic extensively.

I would call this an intermediate level PHP book. It goes beyond your beginning PHP books. Yes, it covers PHP and MySQL basics in the first two sections. And then, it gets into the meat of why your learning PHP and MySQL with major sections on "Planning Web Applications", "Implementing you Web Application, and three "Sample Projects."

What I thought this book added that the basic PHP books do not cover was a constant attention to web security. If security could be a problem in each section of the book, the security issue was explained, and the example showed you how to protect your application from the potential security problem. It also covered areas that are usually glossed over in beginning books, such as cookies & sessions, secure (encryped) layer, user authentication, error handling, form validation, and regular expressions.

You can hardly go wrong with this book, it will give you a solid foundation for whatever you want to do in web development. I highly recommend it.

Other Reviews

• One Star is too high for this book
• Outstanding Book on PHP and MySQL
• Way, way too ambitious for one book.
• Great Intermediate level PHP book
• Good materials to start off with but needs proof reading