Preserved Topic: Best PHP Books?

question for you all .. which book is the best PHP book out there .. I went to the book store this past weekend .. picked up two PHP books (both on PHP 4.0) and they both lacked properly communicating the language

so I'm asking you all .. which book do you think is the best out there?

Doc if you read this .. what PHP book do you have?

As a rule of thumb I always have found the Oreilly books to be the best in the biz. They usually have many ranges in books from straight refrences to introductions to coding.

The key to this question is how comfortable you are with writing code, do you need a primer that walks you through basic code theory or just a refrence to get you pointed down the right road.



.:[ The Tao of Steve ]:.
Be Desireless
Be Excellent
Be Gone
...................................

I have the Sams PHP and MySQL Web Development book and its great! I can't say all the Sams books are as good though, as the ASP.NET book I have from them isn't as good... but then again it is ASP.NET!

--Lurch--

The best place to go for PHP is PHP.net go to the documentation and read through it. It is an awsome place to get PHP information from. It will have you coding in a matter of moments.

I have a couple of PHP books and must say the documentation and online tutorials PHPbuilder.com is the best way to go about the learning process.

sorry .. been busy and lazy in getting back to my own thread .. shame on this Lunatic

I'm very comfortable with writing code and do know the php language I'm just looking for a book to help me get DEEPER into understand PHP

I've gone to php.net .. and I just haven't been able to concentrate on just reading over one site .. that's my problem .. I'm on the internet .. I surf or work on code .. I bounce back and forth from reading news articles to doing code to drawing something in Photoshop .. I can't stay at a site for more then an hour and be fully concentrated on it .. if I had a book infront of me then I would read it and put myself into it .. a website .. I don't put myself into a website unless its mine or Docs or some of the few others that float around this place and I find very good at what they do and know how to work with many things .. that list wont be known because I do not want to step on any toes .. I mention Doc because this is his site .. I'm kissing ass people .. sheesh .. LOL

thanks for the insight .. I still haven't picked a book but I most likely will pick a Oreilly .. since I know them very well

Before you go Oreilly, which is almost always a very good choice, Sams has 2 offerings I found to be very helpfull and definitely for people looking to make the next step with PHP.

Lurch has already mentioned one of them, "PHP and MySQL Web Development" which I read cover to cover and go back to often as a reference. The other book is not so much to learn from by reading in a linear fashion, but is exelent for those times when you need to accomplish something and you don't quite know how to go about it. It's PHP Developer's Cookbook.

-Butcher-

I have 2 PHP books and I found them both quite usefull. Core PHP Programming & PHP and MySQL Web Development. Although of the two the latter was better IMHO. I can't really say anything about the Oreilly books as i've never read them. Although if bitdamaged says it's good then well... it'd be good.

Although I always follow a simple methodology when it comes to investing in programming books. The one thing you don't want is something that you'll flick through once and never read again as it's just that bit too basic for you. I did that with [i]DHTML & CSS for he world wide web[i]. It was basicaly just a re-hash of online tutorials.

Although we all need the basic stuff right. I mean, we all need to start somewhere. But what better place then to start then with the hundereds of on-line tutorials. So many people are willing to share their knowledge on the internet yetvery few are willling to teach you an entire programming language. This leads to an abundance of simple beginner targeted tutorials on almost every subject.

This is what I use for my starting point whenever I'm thinking about learning something new. This way I can also see weather or not I'm actualy going to like or be able to use language X. More so, this should also help me when it comes time to invest in a nice solid book to progress my learning.