Rating: 

The book is sloppily written (check the large number of typos and errors and there's more not listed on this site) and it demonstrates poor coding practices for those trying to learn proper ones - brackets are placed haphazardly throughout, there's different spacing for the supposedly same syntax in different scripts (this is explained away at the end by saying 'indentation is a personal choice' - what about consistency?).

The prose is obtuse and difficult to follow and some is just facile. For example this paragraph is followed by a heading and then a redundant paragraph...

'Since we haven't given you much tangible, sink-your-teeth-into-it PHP code, we're going to give you a great example of how PHP can easily create a conversion tool. Using conversion tools, you could convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius, or U.S. Units of Measurement to Metric. Pretty cool, huh?’ [authors' vernacular]

‘Building a Feet-to-Meters Converter in PHP..
We're going to show you the power of PHP by creating a feet-to-meters converter application which would be handy of your web site is used internationally.'

And while the book doesn't feature the absurdities of 'expert' Larry Ullman's effort, these authors don't seem to know HTML (let alone XHTML and CSS) either. They cover their lack of expertise in this (what I'd consider vital) area with a recommendation to use 'Templates'...

'Templates separate the HTML code that defines the presentation or look of a page from the PHP code that's responsible for gathering the data. Once separated, it becomes easier for someone [apparently not these authors] with HTML and perhaps CSS knowledge to modify the template without worrying about breaking the PHP code. Likewise, the PHP code can focus on the data instead of getting caught up in presentation details.'

HTML is not a presentation language - that's what CSS is for.

And, if PHP is a language for joining strings of text together to make web pages - how can you write about it and not understand such basics? Many of the scripts output strings with just <br /><br /> (ie misused XHTML syntax) to create 'double' line breaks and then others switch to uppercase HTML(4?) syntax with <TABLE BORDER...

But then the authors give semantic web design advice on how to use the fieldset 'tag' to 'logically define a set of data'.

I can't question their knowledge of PHP/MySQL, but this book doesn't appear to have been edited technically or otherwise.