Rating: 

Like so many other PHP books out there, it is intended as a way of teaching a newbie how to program in PHP. This isn't a bad thing, however, when you teach a newbie how to do it poorly, that is another story. Just from reading the example chapter, I would not recommend this book (at least to a PHP newbie). The examples have mixed use of long and short tags. Short tags are not available on all servers.

The first code examples included assumes that register_globals = On (which is no longer the default for PHP-4.1.0 and newer. The author later warns that the best way to access GET, POST, and SESSSION variables is to use the HTTP_*_VARS arrays - which are replaced by new super global arrays ($_POST, $_GET, $_SESSION, etc.) in PHP-4.1 (current PHP version is 4.2.1)

These two points alone are the cause of many confused PHP newbies on USENET because they assume that an example in a book will work on all servers. However, for users that know PHP well enough to recognize these issues, the example chapter did do a good job of explaining the basic functionality of sessions along with when to use them, when not to use them, and examples of how to use them.