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.