[.ca] PHP Black Book (ISBN 1932111093)

could have been a lot better:
i read this book , i read this book again and i read this book thrice . except for a few things there is nothing that helped me . Most of the examples are poor to follow and many of them do not work . the only thing that can be learnt from the book is that there's nobody else in the world who can program better than Peter Moulding . Peter Moulding is a guru , he has learnt 50 websites , 25 years of experience , lots of languages etc. etc. etc. and other people who make websites are foolish but call themselves 'experts' . I am not writing this because of frustration but thats how the book really is

This scares me.:
I live in Sydney and am currently working on a project that I took over from Peter. Peter had written this from the ground up and had spent 6 months on it (so I'm told). We wpent 6 weeks trying to sort out his code before scrapping it entirely and starting from scratch. Four weeks later I had the site back to where Peter had gotten it to. The thing that scares me is that someone actually commissioned him to write a book on a topic that (from my personal experience and anecdotes from many others) he know very little about. I've had a browse through the book (a friend purchased it) and couldn't see anything that couldn't be picked up by reading the online documentation with the user comments.

PHP BLACK BOOK IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED:
I went from knowing some HTML before I bought this book, and after reading PHP Black Book I was able to dive into PHP right away. I am now a developer of a Content Management System which implements PHP and a MySQL database, which I owe alot of credit to this book. Peter Moulding has done an outstanding job writing this book! Though I do admit some of the example code is incorrect, everything that is written and meant to teach you something succeeds with flying colors. This is also an excellent PHP reference book. Anytime I am in doubt of something, or need to double check something, this book has the answer. It was well worth the money!

Much Ado about PHP Black Book:
This is not a very well-organized book. The examples are generally over-simplified. My biggest complaint, however, is with the cd rom - it includes "Source Code" from the examples in the book. The source code is merely all of the snippets of code in each chapter jammed into a few html pages. For example chapter 17, "Objects" has several "Example" pages which do not work because objects are illegally redefined several times within the same page. The author does spell it all out in the chapter, but the examples are simply not usable.

Learning PHP can be fun and effective with this book:
I've bought a couple of PHP and other programming books that were good and when I ordered the PHP Black Book, I never thought that this would become my desk reference and partner on work. Why? Because it has a simple, interesting, fun reading and because it is so well written and organized that you wont get lost on chapters and subjects. For me, it is not one more book, this has become The Book and if you're considering PHP programming, you've got it all here with fun and professionalism.