This book covers the open-source MediaWiki wiki engine from installation and getting started through structuring your collaborative website, advanced formatting, images, multimedia, security, and managing users to backing up, restoring, and migrating your installation and creating new MediWiki templates. The author, Mizanur Rahman, is a Senior Software Engineer at ReliSource Technologies. The book has a fast-paced, friendly tutorial style and uses a fun example to teach all of MediaWiki's key features. This book is for competent computer users who want to run MediaWiki. They should have some knowledge of HTML and have used a wiki before. No PHP knowledge is required for most of the book, although some chapters at the end include some PHP code.
This book is ok, and mostly still relevant a decade later. However, there are also critical errors in some examples and the writing is not always clear. I would not recommend paying for a new copy at this point, as the help materials on the MediaWiki site are much more well-written, in addition to being current. The MediaWiki help can be daunting for newbies or non-tech-savvy users, but if you are looking for an absolute beginner's guide, I recommend looking elsewhere.