After all these years I still recommend Meloni
After all these years, I still recommend Meloni to anyone first dipping their toes in the PHP pool. Her instructions were clear and workable and much that I learned from her I still use. She applied everything she taught, and summarized the code at chapter ends so you could see it all together. --Dan 2008
PHP Fast & Easy Web Development
This was a rather short book. 472 pages but the fonts and diagrams were huge. I read it in three days. What this book covered was the basics of PHP, good for any beginners wanting to learn PHP with no prior programming experience (With the exception of HTML). There was no case assigments or anything in this book to test your knoweldge of PHP. There were a few, not many, but a few typo errors in some of the source code in the book, which may confuse a beginner if they are just starting out. This book covered the basics and *only* the basics of PHP web development. However, this book has a very good constructed reference of PHP functions and MySQL.
Exelent!
This book is the best PHP book I have ever read! If there is any better book for PHP on the market I will be very surprised! This book is great for beginners (ME) and probally even advanced PHP programmers! I just ordered the seconed eddition, and I'm looking foreward to reading it!
Start with this book to learn PHP and MySQL
This is an extraordinarily helpful and well-written book for the person who wants to move from static web pages to data driven pages. Each step is carefully explained in detail, and each chapter builds a useful category of web page, so that you find yourself moving very quickly into doing useful work. I started out learning PHP with a different book and was bogged down with esoteric details, but when I went back to PHP with this book everything fit and everything worked. For those who do not yet have Apache, PHP and MySql on their machines, the book furnishes a CD with these programs for both Linux and Windows, along with the usual detailed explanation of how to install and configure them. At some point you will probably want to get a more advanced book to do wild and crazy things, but if you are like me, you will still find yourself coming back to this one to be sure you got it right. Great book!
The best book for beginning PHP!
This is without a doubt the best book I've ever read for PHP beginners! This books starts you out nice and easy and gets you into writing PHP and using MySQL. The book also teaches you how to create several SIMPLE PHP applications that you can integrate into your SMALL website (or expand to meet your needs). This book is NOT for intermediate/expert PHP programmers expecting to learn how to build large, complex applications! For you, I STRONGLY recommend "PHP and MySQL Web Development" by Luke Welling & Laura Thomson. Yes, this book does have some typos (many technical books do). However, if you have half a brain, you can usually get around such typos and make the code work.
(64 reviews)