Book Review - The Web Wizard's Guide to PHP

I recently finished a programming book that I was quite happy with. This may actually be the first time I've ever been really happy with a technology book. I've been content with many a book before, but never really happy with one.

There are a few reasons why I liked this one so much

1. It seems to be written for someone who already knows how to program and wants to add PHP to their knowledge base. Thus, it skips over the 5 page explanation of what a variable is, something that you find in many programming books because they all assume you've never programmed before.
   
2. It's short. With less than 200 pages and a smaller page size than your average book, you could easily finish this book in a weekend if you had to learn PHP in a pinch.
3. Full colour pages. Vain? Maybe. Trivial? Hardly. We are talking about a book on programming, there are bound to be some dry parts here people and those colour pages may just get you through that.

Now, I'd be a horrible critic if I didn't point out some bad parts of this book. The part I found the most frustrating about this book is the code descriptions. Each code example is followed by a bulleted description of the key lines in the example. The problem is that many descriptions are repeated over and over throughout the examples. There's a good chance that I can recognize the database connection string after the first twenty times I see it.

On the whole, however, I found this book an easy read that got down to business and showed the things I wanted it to. It didn't get into the crazy advanced functionality, but I don't think anyone would expect a book this size to do so.