Rating: 

I felt that this book's function summaries were incomplete, and that they were pretty much useless, other than for syntax reference. Half of the functions which were something like:

int function_name(param1, param2, ...)

had a description like:

Does something.

Well, the function returns an int, right? What might that int be? Doesn't say.

Also, the examples used in the book were kinda pointless - we don't exactly need a lesson on handling a web form. I'd rather that they'd have included the include_once() function for one, since that's a heck of a great function which I didn't learn about up until recently, and could have saved a heck of a lot of headaches, plus there's never a reference to using $DOCUMENT_ROOT or anything like that to help make things easier.

The fact that the "big book" hasn't come out yet (and it was supposedly due out back in "Winter of 2000", to quote the O'Reilly open source catalog, makes me a little suspicious as to how good it's going to be. I've seen too many crappy ASP books out there, written in a hurry, or just to hop on the huge web scripting fad. I'm hesitant to pick up a PHP book because of this, and am holding out for the O'Reilly one (esp. if Rasmus wrote it), but I think I'm probably going to have to be strongly convinced to buy this book for about $40.00 if it's going to be as crappy as the little one.

I'm really disappointed in this, because I thought O'Reilly would be a strong proponent of the PHP movement, and they come out with a book like this? Someone needs to reassess what's quality and what's not or something.