Core PHP Programming is now updated for PHP 5. The new object model allows for genuine object-oriented programming, and the book now covers design patterns. All existing PHP developers will want to find out about these new features.
I found the second edition to be useful as a quick reference. Now that I am nearing the completion of my first read of the third edition I anticipate one rereading at least. There are many topics and specifics here covered with which I had little or no prior familiarity and some features of PHP of which I had knowledge became newly exciting to me. For my purposes this is almost a different text than the second edition. In sum and in my own work it is proving to be a book of great worth.
Is it a reference book? Yes. Is it dry? Undoubtedly. But if you want to know all there is to know about PHP, this is the book.
I recently rediscovered it while running through a PHP class at Treehouse. The understanding of Object-Oriented Programming I gained alone was well worth the purchase price. Now I'm pouring over the design patterns examples.This is a great book to nerd out on.
This isn't a bad book, but I bought it specifically for its coverage of PHP5 and was very disappointed in that respect. It only provides a fairly cursory overview of the newer features, whereas I'd prefer to have seen a much more extensive exploration of fully OO PHP as enabled by PHP5.
read it when I was an aspiring script kiddie in High School. First bit was alright. But then the second half was just a hard copy dump of library reference manual. Duh.