I don’t know why my suspicions get raised when book covers have phrases such as “books for professionals by professionals.” I guess it’s due to the fact that, most of the time, advertising copy is a poor reflection of intellectual content. What a pleasure to delve into this title and find the slogan might be accurate!

The first chapter is a superficial overview of PHP: hypertext preprocessor (PHP), which can be skipped. It is fortunately followed by a second chapter, on PHP installation and configuration, which is a gem. Chapter 3, on PHP basics, is the actual overview and introduction to PHP, and is extensive, detailed, and well written.

The next three chapters cover PHP functions, arrays, and “object-oriented PHP.” I’m not going to enter the religious wars on this last one; in this book, the text sticks to the specifics, so that the overall theory can be debated elsewhere. Chapter 7 does purport to cover “Advanced OOP Features,” but is so brief, and lacking in the meta overview, that personally I doubt it will serve the novice well.

More important are chapter 8, on error and exception handling, chapter 9, on strings and regular expressions, and chapter 10, on working with the file and operating system. Chapter 10 has an excellent discussion of file input and output, and can be put to immediate use by most readers. (There are 30 chapters in this 800-page book, so I will not go on in this manner; the PHP section continues through 19 chapters and 492 pages, and includes decent discussions of Web services and secure PHP.)

The introduction to structured query language (SQL) begins with the lite version, on page 493, and fortunately goes right into MySQL installation, configuration, clients, tables, and secure MySQL. MySQL query functions are discussed in a practicable and applicable manner, as are indexes, searching, and data import and export.

In summary, I found this to be an excellent and clear book for the practitioner. Platform differences are not shorted, particularly in the sections on installation and configuration. This is a detail to be thankful for, especially for those of us who traverse platforms occasionally. This is a strong book for getting down to work, and is not a college text.