I recently purchased PHP 5 for Dummies with a gift voucher I received from my sister. I was looking for a solid book and not a tutorial, because I actually wanted to feel some pages and look at something solid.

I’ve been teaching myself perl, java and php all at the same time - which is not a bad idea because studying from different sources you pick up the commonality in the language.

PHP 5 for Dummies is a good basic book. It is easy to follow but has enough meat in it to make it a learning experience. It had very little info about apache and mysql, the author has written another book on those subjects, so it is pretty much all php 5.

It covers all the basics you would expect from a beginners book. The style is very readable and there are lots of examples. Coverage of object oriented programming in my opinion could have been beefed up, but I suppose it is a beginners book.

Overall I was very satisfied with the product and would recommend it to beginners who are interested in learning the php language.

Pretty cool.