Product Reviews

Larry Ullman's book on PHP is now in its second edition and it's good, but only if you are a complete beginner. It ignores the sophisticated aspects of PHP, including object orientation. "This topic is beyond the scope of this book" is a phrase that crops up frequently.

If you can live with that, this book should provide a useful introduction to PHP. It starts from the very basics of programming and progresses to the point where you should be able to do something useful. It covers the fundamentals of MySQL and using databases and files within web pages, but omits anything advanced.

If you can create a web page and want to learn how to create dynamic or data-based web pages, this is an excellent place to start. The explanations are thorough and the examples are usually helpful, though occasionally they could be simpler. The second edition clears up some of the errors in the first edition and extends coverage to PHP5 as well as PHP4.