BeginningPHP&MySQL

I posted a review to amazon.com for a new edition of the Apress published book Beginning PHP and MySQL 5: From Novice to Professional

Here is a link to my review, I was pretty happy with the book, 4 out of 5 stars

Here is the content of the review:

This has been a great book for me. I've been using & tweaking PHP applications for a few years, and recently had occasion to build one. The fact that this book could also refresh my MySQL skills peaked my interest. I was impressed with the nice examples, long enough to show the main idea, yet other reviewers are right, there is not much here in the way of fullout precanned applications.

I like that this book seems to be organized so that rather than just read it from cover to cover you can dive in and learn from any particular section. The examples can can be downloaded from the Apress site. At times, when printed examples left details out it would be nice if those details would be included in the down-loadable examples (.css files are used in the HTML_Table demos, but never shown or down-loadable).

After browsing the MySQL sections I was able to create and manipulate the db I wanted in no time.

This book covers lots of ground, I was impressed with the completeness of PHP topics, including things you might not expect, like Smarty templates and the Data abstraction of PDO.

Contrary to other Amazon.com reviews of this book, I don't think this book is a complete PHP reference manual, it's not meant to be. But if you have this book and a link to a PHP reference website, you'll be fine!