Rating: 
Summary: Excellent and comprehensive guide to PHP
Review: This is a wonderful book! I've had this nagging background need to learn PHP for some time and have been putting it off as one of those extra little tasks I could do without. After reading just a little of this book I couldn't wait to get started! Leon Atkinson aims his book at both beginner and advanced users and his writing style manages to score a direct hit! The basics are covered in sufficient detail to allow the intelligent beginner to follow along and learn useful stuff pretty quickly. This is achieved without talking down to advanced users, or bogging them down in masses of simple things. The organisation and layout of the book is good enough to allow most readers to jump straight into the sections that interest them most, so if you just want to use this book for reference, rather than have it act as a tutor, you can. Lots of references to more elementary programming texts are provided for anyone who does find themself struggling with the concepts, but I can't really imagine anyone needing them. Coverage is very comprehensive too, so you never find yourself left in the lurch just as things are about to get really interesting, as I've had happen in many books aimed at beginners. So far, this book has provided good solid instruction of every PHP task I've needed or fancied (although a better index wouldn't go amiss!) and has frequently provided me with a coded solution all ready to plug in and use! I can see that this volume will have a place alongside my computer for some time!
Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive PHP
Review: The Core PHP is one of the most comprehensive printed resources available for PHP. The online resouces provide give greater breadth, but this comes close.
Rating: 
Summary: A decent reference, though not as useful as the free manual
Review: This book does a solid job of listing the basic functions and descriptions and is aimed more at the beginner, so I would recommend it to someone who is just starting out with PhP and/or who may not want to be online all the time to get reference help. Experienced PhP programmers probably won't find enough in this book to warrant it's cost, but the beginner should definitely consider buying it. This book is a nice reference but doesn't really have much beyond what you can find online. (which you can also download for free). In fact I find the online manual more helpful because of the annotations which make it a work in progress. It's a philosophical issue - do you like having a real book in your hands to browse through or do you not mind using a web browser?
Rating: 
Summary: Burn before reading
Review: I was fairly warned by Amazon reviewers that this book issimply a print version of the PHP functions found on [the internet], but I went ahead and bought it anyway. I figured that the author must have added something to the online documentation. As it turns out, the author's additions consist mostly of typos and grammatical errors. I wouldn't mind it so much if Atkinson had at least added a useful topical index. Instead, the index is largely a listing a PHP's functions. Why bother? Considering PHP's power and elegance, I wouldn't be surprised if Core PHP Programming turns out to be an act of sabotage hatched by the Microsoft folks. Fortunately, the language not only survived this attack, but has flourished.
Rating:
Summary: Do not buy this book.
Review: This book is useful as an expensive alternate to the online function list, but it really offers nothing usful in itself. If you are new to programming a book that contains mistakes mistakes in a large portion of its sample code is not very helpful in getting over the learning curve. The examples are at best half jobs. Most of the function examples are exceptionally partial, and there is little commentary to fill this hole. DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK
Rating: 
Summary: Little more than the online function reference repackaged
Review: If you are already a programmer you will not find anything here that isn't already in the online documentation you can download.... After a number of chapters on "how to program," there is a virtual reprint of the function reference from the PHP web site. The Postgresql examples have mistakes in them. I think there were two things I actually got out of this book that I couldn't find in the online documentation.
Rating: 
Summary: a decent way to get started with PHP
Review: I bought this book as an alternative to the online PHP documentation and found it to be much more readable than the online docs. The functions dealing with different databases are in large print and usually have a small example of code to illustrate the usage. The book spends a lot of time describing basic programming concepts such as functions and regular expressions, but not nearly enough time showing examples of web applications. All in all though, it was a decent way to get started with PHP and I was able to write a few scripts that involved retrieving/storing data from a web form after looking through the book a bit. The book would be good for someone who doesn't find the online documentation particularly helpful and is looking for a way to get started with PHP. I plan to buy another book or two on PHP to hopefully find better explanations and more examples.
Rating:
Summary: A poor book, made worse by the layout.
Review: As many people have discovered, this book is a very basic introduction to PHP. The function reference, while useful, offers no extra value than the existing online PHP manual. For me, the worse problem with this book was the layout. I found the reference sections very hard to read because of a bewildering number of typefaces and indentation style. If you want a printed reference but don't want to print out the manual, then this book will almost get you by.
Rating:
Summary: Not as bad as everyone says
Review: *IF* you use the book in the way it meant to be used. The book is a sort of a beginner's tutorial/reference hybrid. It is not meant to augment the skills of the PHP coding veteran, but instead, provide the beginner with a fairly good idea about the basics of PHP programming, as it generally assumes little of the reader. It also explains the core functions in a way that is easier to understand for the beginner than the online documentation, which, when I stated out years ago seemed quite daunting at times. The more experienced may find it useful as a reference when the online docs are not available, but the book will not tell you how to solve complex development problems. It is a tutorial and reference of the core language, that is not its job. Buy this book if you are a beginner or need a general reference guide. No book can teach you how to solve every development problem; it can only show you the tools at your disposal so you can solve these problems yourself.
Rating:
Summary: Good intro when your 'unplugged'
Review: There isn't much added here when compared to the online PHP manual. However, for the beginner, the examples help. I've found it useful for quick reference on airplanes and such when the online manual isn't available. NOTE: This book refers to PHP3 doesn't have much info on PHP4. In a nutshell, the bound online manual minus the user comments.
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