Best PHP Guide

[Dave]

Would you guys reccommend O'Reilly's PHP CookBook, or the PHP Bible?

[interactive]

PHP Bible I heard is pretty good. If you already have a decent amount of programming experience though, I wouldn't mess around too much with reading a book (the PHP Bible works as a good reference though). I would just goto like planetsourcecode and start looking at scripts.

[JSpired]

I agree. Both books are very good, but if you have some experience already and know the basics, you'll probably only use them for reference.

[Kriek]

Various versions of the PHP Bible for complete references and examples.

[net-trend]

Get the Wrox one.

[Locke]

Larry Ullman taught me through his books. I got into it through books, and I use them as a reference here and there. Probably the best thing to do is check out sites like Devshed.com and many many many others who offer articles and tutorials on these kinds of things.

[MikeA]

This may be a little late, but here are the books I use and they are fantastic:

Sams Teach Yourself PHP4 in 24 hours
ISBN - 0-672-31804-0

This is an excellent newby book plus it tends to explain things a little better than the others I have.


PHP and MySQL Web Development
ISBN - 0-672-31784-2

This is another EXCELLANT book. It has lots of information about MySQL and it includes projects like building a forums, shopping cart, content management system, web based e-mail and more.


PHP 4 Bible
ISBN - 0-7645-4716-X

This is a very technical book. It has a little of everything but it doesn't really go into lots of detail about how things do what they do...just how to do them.

[Placer14]

I suggest a recommend "PHP and MySQL Web Development, Second Edition by Luke Welling, Laura Thomson" Very thorough and gave great examples and application. (ISBN: 067232525X)

I've read that book cover to cover at least twice. Though I wouldn't stop with just one book either. I also read PHP Bible and I was satisfied with that book as well. :)

[S3G]

I suggest a recommend "PHP and MySQL Web Development, Second Edition by Luke Welling, Laura Thomson" Very thorough and gave great examples and application. (ISBN: 067232525X)

Another recommendation for that one. Good if you have a little bit of background programming in something like C since it's not a book which holds your hand. Looks like I've got the first edition though, so hopefully they've improved the arrays section; it was really bad imo. The examples they give are overall very good.. Would be nice if they did a little more of the examples using OOP though. The only other PHP book I've got is O'Reilly's Cookbook. Useful occasionally but I generally reach for the Web Development one first. The cookbook has not been as handy as I thought it would be when I bought it.

HTH,

S3G