I can summarize this review in nine words. If you want to learn PHP, buy this book. But that wouldn’t be much of a review now would it. Jason Gilmore starts this book the way most beginner’s books start; with some history. But hold on tight because it doesn’t take long before your hands start getting dirty.

After the brief history the book jumps right into installing and configuration then blasts right into PHP basic; syntax, tags, data types. Then it’s not long before you are writing functions, using arrays, and then one of the most updated features of PHP 5, OOP. The book keeps moving right along into advanced features like error handling, regular expressions, and networking. And just when you think you have learned it all and you couldn’t possibly think of anything else you could do with PHP, the book throws MySQL into the mix. By the end of this book you should have no problems writing PHP and MySQL enabled web pages and applications.

This book is a perfect mix of what someone new to PHP needs to know as well as providing advanced material and a reference once you have a grasp of the basics. So to summarize, if you want to learn PHP, buy this book.

Simon Brown upgraded Javaranch's Radio this past weekend to Pebble 1.5.1.

I changed my theme to Pebble's default theme because it looks great in the new version. Pebble just continues to get better and better. Kudos Simon on a wonderful blogging app.

I've got 2 GMail invites to give away. You know the drill. The First 2 comments get them. Don't forget to give me an E-mail address to send them to along with your name.

I wonder how much longer GMail is going to be beta? I am running out of people to send invites to.