I'm writing this on May 17th 2010 after purchasing this book a few days ago. I have made it through the first 4 chapters but on reaching chapter 5 that's when the real problems began. The book features a case study: a fictional wine store with it's own PHP code and mySQL database. One of the problems is the code was written for PHP 4, not 5, so I'm getting tons of errors. They could be fixed if I knew how, but that kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?



The code page where you download examples hasn't been updated since 2005.



Another major problem and this one can't be blamed on time is that the code examples and the wine store app itself have a few programming errors. I was able to spot and fix these but it goes to show you that whoever wrote this thing didn't even bother to run and check to see if their code actually works. When you're trying to learn a programming language the last thing you want to worry about is the author's own mistakes. You could literally spend hours wondering what YOU did wrong when in reality it's THEIR fault.



I can't comment on Chapter 5 onwards because this book is now mostly useless to me, and to anyone who wants to learn PHP and mySQL in a PHP 5 environment (today's world). Unfortunately I don't have any recommendation as a substitute, though I would suggest checking what version the book is for before buying.