Rating: 

On page 249 the author gives an example of how to make the system call "df" in linux and then print the results on a html page. In the 9 lines short example he makes two errors. First he starts the <pre> tag with "</pre>" instead of "<pre>". Ok, that can be obvious for some readers and they can quicly correct it. But then he writes this in the same example:

exec(escapeshellcmd(“df”),$output_lines,$return_value);
echo “$o”;
}

WTF? Considering the very point of his example is to show how to output the contents of a file, his error is not obvious. In one place he calls the variable $output_lines and in the other place he calls it $o. That is not simply a typo.

On page 51 he calls the character "\" backslash, which is correct. On page 52 he suddenly starts calling the character "slash" instead of "backslash". He does that consistently three times on the same page.

If this would have been a story book I would have kept reading anyway if the story would have been good. But these kinds of errors are unacceptable in a book that teaches programming where every letter is crucially important. I make enough errors on my own learning a new programming language. I don't want to guess what errors are mine and what come from the author of the book.

The illustrations that are supposed to help you understand basic concepts such as variables only confuse you. It feels like the author added them afterwards because his boss forced him too, and not because the author really wanted to include any himself.

I read the first 70 pages (I skipped the sections describing how to install PHP and its prerequisites since I already knew how to do that) and I didn't catch even one joke nor pun during that time. I remember the O'reilly Perl books where full of them. Ok, I'll admit humor is not essential to a programming book but it really makes the read so much more enjoyable with clever little puns.

I do not recommend this particular book to anyone. The O'Reilly Perl books and HTML books on the other hand were very, very good. So if you have a few books to choose from I would recommend the O'Reilly one. In general, that is.