Great book!!
Went through the first one..this one by Larry Ulman as well taught me much more.
Wait for second edition
This is the first edition, which covers PHP3 and PHP4. PHP5 has been out for a while and supports much more OOP. A second edition will probably require much rewriting.
Intermediate but Very Good
There is a lot more to PHP than Ullman covers in his 'PHP Advanced'. But what he does cover, is well done. Not too verbose. Direct and to the point. I like his explanations & examples. It makes learning and referencing a subject easier and quicker.
Looking forward to 2nd edition & hoping he adds more advanced subjects.
This Guy Knows His Stuff
Coming from the world of ASP/VBS, etc., I thoroughly searched the local generic huge book store chain, and thumbed through and finally selected 3 books to teach me PHP/mySQL.
Only after I got home and read 'em in depth did I realize they were all written by the same guy, Larry Ullman:
MySQL; PHP for the WWW; and PHP Advanced.
All three books are great, they are easy to follow, I am getting better and better jobs because of the skills I've gleaned from these books. The author also hosts a forum for poeple who have questions about what's in the boks.
Very helpful stuff, you'll benefit from it.
Intermediate, a hard read, poor editing
A bunch of people are out there writing tons of PHP books, because it is such a "hot" web language. Do a quick Amazon search and you'll find lots of "advanced" adjectives in titles. This text is not advanced (no detailed session management, minimal security descrition). The description of classes (objects) is okay, but could use a more in-depth discussion of object data access, function overloading, etc.. (realizing PHP's objects are not "real" objects -- yet). At a higher level, I find the Visual Quickpro format hard to read. They use a two-column newspaper style of typesetting that results in short sentances that I find hard to read. Everything is kind of "cramped-up". Also, some of the code examples show poor editing. For example; pgs 196 and 197 show two full pages of HTML OPTION values for months, days of month, years, etc.. Give me a break!, I don't need to see all this stupid HTML if I am writing advanced PHP!! Also related to editing, some of the web-page examples are half-page size to fit the two-column typesetting.
