php books

[real_illusions]

i was looking at some php books in amazon, just wondered which ones you recommend?http://www.amazon.co.uk/o/ASIN/0672326728/...3595925-0963667http://www.amazon.co.uk/o/ASIN/1590595521/...3595925-0963667http://www.amazon.co.uk/o/ASIN/0975240218/...3595925-0963667or any others that are on amazon and i haven't linked to.I have a couple of CSS books that are really good, so, i'd thought i'd go for a php book or 2 as well.

[Anders Moen]

I haven't read any books about PHP except the tutorials at W3Schools, but if you're gonna buy a book, remember that it should fit your host. Like, if your host let you use PHP5, do not buy a PHP4 book, because a lot of the codes there will just have errors.

[henryhenry]

I bought a book last week.http://www.amazon.co.uk/MySQL-Dynamic-Visu...TF8&s=booksI've been through most of it and thoroughly recommend. My level was - done the w3schools tutorials - eyes hurting from too much looking at screens. Head hurting from trying to find extra info on net. I needed a book to learn more quickly (I'm on a deadline!) and broaden my understanding of what php can do. This book has pretty much fulfilled everything I expected! I'm a happy customer!I don't think you need any knowledge before starting. Having done the w3schools tutorials and played a bit I found the first 3 chapters easy but still useful to clarify things. Then it was steadily increasing my knowledge. It's based on mysql4.1 not the latest v5. This doesn't seem a major problem. Mysqli is covered in the later chapters but isn't required.Drawbacks: occasionally the layout isn't great (some scripts squeezed into narrow columns), one of the sql files that's meant to be on the website isn't there (again very minor - only affects one script).Well I'm very happy with it. The author has a website and when I posted a question to his forum I got a reply (from him) in less than a day!Hope that's useful.Henry

[jlhaslip]

The book linked in the post above mine is the better of the ones posted, IMHO. Larry Ullman writes in an incredibly easy to understand fashion and makes it easy to have a full featured site up and running in no time flat.The others are good, too, but I'll stick with Ullman, thanks. He supports a php/mysql website forum which is quite helpful and active for assisting with your problems, too, so I highly reccomend that book for the simple fact that he TEACHES you, not just cashes his royalty cheques.

[justsomeguy]

I prefer the O'Reilly series of books:http://www.oreilly.com/pub/topic/phpSpecifically, these:http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/progphp2/http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learnphpmysql/http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/webdbapps2/The first book there is co-authored by the man who wrote the first three versions of PHP.