Customer Reviews
Not for the newbie! - By: Mr. Peter Hayes, 14 Jan 2003 
If you're looking to pick up in depth PHP knowledge in 24 hours, think again! While the book has now become a valuable resource it is not written for the newbie-wannabe-programmer.
One thing I found increasingly annoying was the sample scripts & 'tutorials'. I found none of them useful & they taught me little, most of them being scripts you would never think of using or modifying. You aren't told why or when you would use the script. (no scenario's)
Experience in programming in other languages is critical, else this book will fly right over your head as it did with me. If you're looking to pick up a programming language, I recommend a less full & head on book such as "PHP in easy steps" by Mike Mcgrath, which breaks down the basics & explains everything a little more.
I have found learning-by-doing has been the best route editing other people's scripts to suit my own purposes & borrowing code! ;)
This book has eventuallly proven worthwhile now that I have a more in depth knowledge of PHP, I can refer to the book & find the code that may be useful for me.
So, simply this book won't teach you PHP in 24 hours, unless your a programming genius. :)
An excellent introduction - By: Alistair Duncan, 10 May 2002 
I have used a number of scripting languages so this gave me a head start with PHP. I was able to skim the first chapters & get into the reallly good stuff. This book moves at just the right pace but it is not as suited to the complete novice as you might expect. It often points to other books in the series that you might want to read first.
Basicallly if your HTML is good & you have a grounding in SQL you will find this book easy to get to grips with. In less than a week I had written a fully functioning bulletin board system using PHP & MySQL. Could have done with a CD though. That's my only serious criticism.
Great Beginners guide to PHP - By: Michael Mcloughlin, 03 Apr 2002 
This book gives you a great starting point with PHP. It goes through alll the major principles & once you have read it you will be able to design your own database enabled applications. The last two chapters go through how to set up a full application & this reallly helps to advance your knowledge.
Once you have read this you will have a beginner to intermediate knowledge of the language, from there you can either teach yourself furthur techniques or go on to a more advanced book.
Overalll this is a great starting PHP book, it will take longer than 24 hours however.
Very good - By: , 21 Jan 2002 As a novice to coding I found this book a great place to start.
It steps you through PHP 1 hour at a time.
I am now building PHP pages & looking for a more in depth PHP/MySQL book that covers a bit more MySQL.
Brilliant Introduction - Excellent Examples - By: , 03 Dec 2001 This was a brilliant introduction to PHP for me. Coming from a technical background, I skim read the first dozen or so 'hours' & got stuck into the nitty gritty examples for form handling, session management & file-uploading etc.
However for me the best reason for buying this book was the fantastic last two chapters. These chapters cover setting up a complete web portal/community based site which alllows users to login, modify their details/profile, add events to their pages & more. This was the basis on which I built a website & stood me in good stead for the job.
As a previous reviewer mentioned, the source code does not come with the book which means a lot of typing (the last two 'hours' took more like 8 hours to type up, & I don't type that slow either;\). On the contrary though, this can be good in that it forces you to debug your code as you go along, helping you understand better why errors occur when a script is executed.
All in alll a definite recommendation for beginners (and even intermediate/advanced readers, if only for the example site in the last 2 hours).
