Rating: 

I come from a publishing background with limited experience with programming. This book is a wonderful guide for an experienced programmer who wants to learn everything about PHP/MYSQL. As an accomplished 'beginner' I am finding this book very difficult to use. The tools along the way are useful but lacking enough depth saving the details for the 'final-exam-like projects' at the back of the book. The Winestore project is detailed and elaborate making it quite difficult to analyze small pieces of code if you are confused. To simply the experience, the author attempts to simply the code by relying on referenced files. Although I can see this is a good habit to use in coding, chasing down the references feels trying during the learning phase.

In essense, I wish the complex code at the back of the book spent an extra chapter slowly constructing the final project.