Rating: 

What a huge disappointment it turned out to be, mostly because it's so poorly written. The authors feel obliged to mention every concept they've ever heard of but don't follow up and explain them; for example, under the heading "Expressions" we read that, "Operators can also be overloaded, which means that they do different things in different contexts." And that's the end of overloading in this book. If you're not going to explain overloaded operators why mention it at all?

Then under the heading "The include Statement" we find this gem: "To make sure that a file is included and to stop your program, immediately use require and its counter part [sic], require_once." Huh? To stop my program use require? Did anybody actually read this book before it hit the stores?

This is a 350 page book, and my impression is that the authors either wrote an 800 page draft before slashing random parts, or wrote a 50 page draft and threw in lots of fluff to get it up to a saleable size. I recommend you don't waste your money on this first edition... it should be easy to find other books on this topic which uphold the O'Reilly tradition of quality and value.