This is the WORST book I have ever bought and tried to get through!
The layout of the book (2 columns on each page) makes it very difficult to read; especially reading a line of code split up and spread accross multiple page lines in a single column.
This book is nothing more than bits and pieces, it lacks a cohesive flow of information.
The author barely describes the information and code, making it hard to understand and comprehend. I spent more time looking things up on the Internet than I spent reading and trying to understand the author.
Trying to get through this book for a 10 week course was impossible.
Just reading and using the author supplied code files taught me very little. I didn't write a single line of code myself, no assignments or suggestions are given in this book which would have helped me learn the material rather than just reading through the book.
Unless you enjoy frustration, this book is a waste of time to read; you will not actually learn much reading this book.

This book is simply amazing. The author is very clear and breaks down the code to explain why he did things the way he did. Even as a seasoned PHP programmer, I still learned quite a few things from this book. The code is structured very neatly. If you are interested in learning about Object Oriented Programming in PHP, this book is a great place to start. I learned a lot about PHP security and OOP and now have a solid foundation that I can expand on. (And those are only a portion of the topics covered in this book!)

Even the chapters on Ajax are spectacular. The author explains everything so well, I was able to modify the Ajax code to do what I wanted with no previous JavaScript experience.

Larry Ullman is an amazing teacher! If you are considering any of his books, they will be well worth your time! I couldn't express this enough. I normally don't write reviews - but I could not resist writing one for this book. It is so good!

The book is very good and is the question to many answers in PHP developers head after crossing the beginners line , it saves alot of googling for tutorials solving this advanced topic , as you notice it's advanced material and by no way for beginners , if you are beginner just read his book PHP and mysql for dynamic websites , this book covers advancd topics like multidimentional arrays , recursion , Security , e-commerse , PHP OOP in three interesting chapters , chapter 6 : basic OOP , chapter 7 : advanced OOP, chapter 8 : real-world OOP , the cover networking stuff like working with Sockets , Geolocation , cURL , Then Chapter 10 illustrate compressing files , PHP-GTK environement , establishing time interval driven commands with CRON and using COM with PHP , Chapter 11 discuss in detail PHP command line interface , chapter 12 for PEAR , chapter 13 for AJAX architecture , implementation and debugging , chapter 14 for PHP and XML integration like parsing XML and programming RSS feed , Larry Ullman always surprise us with his writing quality and the ease we digest his illustration . recommended :)

Have just started reading but so far it is explaining things that I had seen but didn't quite understand. Larry Ullman explains all and will take the time to help on his forums for each book he writes. A must have for anyone learning PHP and wants to go to the next level.

I've purchased this book and PHP 6 and MySQL 5 for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide, both by Larry Ullman. They're wonderful -- with them, I took my first steps into working with databases and a language like PHP. The step by step examples have made it very easy to learn and when I've been stuck -- I've gone to Larry's site and he's answered my questions in his forum. Two of the best purchases I've ever made. Highly recommended.