alot of good stuff
This is your basic huge book of php concepts from the basics to the advanced. It reads more like a manual than a demonstration or tutorial.
I would recomend it to anyone looking to get a good overview of php 5
Confusing presentation of sessions
I have another "unleashed" book and was very happy with it, so immediately picked up this book when needing to work with PHP. What I needed to learn about was session usage.
Unfortunately, this book is not very good for that, for a novice learning to use sessions. The reason why is not because it is too advanced--I'm adept at reading computer textbooks and parsing the info--the problem is that it is a best practice in terms of security to turn register_globals off in PHP, that is the standard config for PHP after 4.1, and yet they provide all of their examples with this being enabled.
They even mention that it isn't best practice, but they go ahead and do it anyway with an occasional caveat here and there for those who are not using it. What that means is that somebody in my position is not only trying to understand the code, but also accound for everything that doesn't apply to me. I have to translate, then interpret. Why should I have to do all that for basic "best practice" functionality?!
I've since picked up other books (PHP 5 recipes, Wicked cool PHP) that are much better. I gave this book the stars it has because it is very informative and useful. In the case of sessions, it is just very confusing.
An Excellent Book For The Intermediate PHP Programmer
After reading a PHP5 book in the past I was happy with it. However it was for beginers. I searched for something more advanced. This was it. PHP5 Unleashed goes over several advanced topics. In example there is Regular Expressions (aka. Regex), Advanced MySQL techniches, accessing the OS's programs (Like dd, cp, etc) and more. One thing I should note as that there are some parts that can't be done on Windows. To get the most of this book you need Linux. ( If you want Linux download the ISO image of Fedora Core 4 at fedora.redhat.com. It is great for beginers to Linux. You can also use Mandrakelinux ([...]) but it isn't as simple to use.) Also note that this book has a section for new users but it is small and you should buy a book for beginers first. Might I recommend "PHP5 Fast & Easy Web Development" for novices.
A little disappointment is that this book shows you only how to INSTALL PEAR. It doesn't show you how to use it at all.
