I initially bought this book because it was the only book in the store that delved right in and immediatly began giving tools to use in a website. Most other books, at the time, seemed to acedemic with much to much theory. However, after reading the majority of this book, I realized that I really didn't learn much of anything. The book spits out large chunks of code and tries to explain parts of it but it doesn't explain other areas that I guess the authors just expect you to figure out on your own.

While this book did give me some basic tools and some decent code (the code is actually very good in this book), I didn't learn enough through out the book to really expand on it.

I returned this book, purchased "PHP and MYSQL Web Development(THIRD EDITION)" by Luke Welling/Laura Thomson, and havn't looked back. I guess, for me, a book that takes a slightly more acedemic approach isn't all bad after all.

If I were just starting off to do a dynamic page web site, that is database driven, this is exactly the software set that I would use. And here in one book is the majority of the software that you'd need to make it work. The only things missing are the operating system (Linux of course) and the mail package.

The nice thing about having all this in one package is that you have a consistent form of writing from software package to package. And you have a consistent set of needs. You don't need to talk about MySQL in business applications, you only need to know how it works in a web environment.

This is a programmer to programmer, beginner level book. It does not spend much time on the actual installation of the programs. I rate this as OK, because many of the Linux books (yes, you also have to have a Linux book) provide a distribution of Linux that include all of this software with instructions on how to install it. This book then picks up with comments on configuring the installation to best suit, this includes things like making PHP point to MySQL which may be lacking in the general installation instructions of the Linux book.

If you are headed to working with AMP (Apache, MySQL & PHP) this is an excellent place to start. It's well written, leads you through the building of a site, and by the end of the book you are well started.