The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP
by David Powers
Amazon Price: $33.50
Customer Review: This is a purchase that I regret. :-( I was quite disappointed by the misleading title. The book contains decent coverage of Dreamweaver for beginners. The book is not quite a tutorial but it is definitely not a comprehensive reference.

The book covers how to do basics in Spry. Spry is the AJAX framework bundled in Dreamweaver. There is no depth in the writing on Spry, and the coverag...

PHP 6 and MySQL 5 for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide
by Larry Ullman
Amazon Price: $23.99
Customer Review: I don't understand why the same exact code needs to be repeated twice on the same page, every page. It's not only a waste of space, it's distracting and difficult.

The whole book could have been printed with less than half this number of pages. I'll work through it when I get the time and PATIENCE.

Shees.

Mastering Regular Expressions
by Jeffrey Friedl
Amazon Price: $29.69
Customer Review: The book is robust and goes into alot detail. I liked the comparing and contrasting between the various RegEx implementations. I had a difficult time digesting some of the detail. In particular, the analogies confused me and I felt the author went overboard with them. Many times, I had to backtrack to understand what was being discussed. However, regular expressions is a complex topic and the auth...

Wicked Cool PHP: Real-World Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems
by William Steinmetz, Brian Ward
Amazon Price: $19.77
Customer Review: PHP is an easy scripting language for creating web features, but like any software it has its quirks. That's where WICKED COOL PHP: REAL-WORLD SCRIPTS THAT SOLVE DIFFICULT PROBLEMS comes into play. It's for those who have some experience with the scripting program but need more specifics to tweak applications. From scripts to process credit cards, template HTML and serve dynamic images to tracking...

Beginning PHP and MySQL: From Novice to Professional, Third Edition (Beginnin...
by W. Jason Gilmore
Amazon Price: $31.74
Customer Review: Hello there,

I begin learning PHP in 2003. I havn't progressed much since then. I learned the basics of PHP from "PHP and MySQL Web Development" by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson. I know how to interact with the database, create sessions, I can even go furder if I'm interested and I read some tutorials over the internet, however I wanted to have a book that I can read in bed.
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Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP (Practical)
by Quentin Zervaas
Amazon Price: $30.34
Customer Review: I have been working with PHP for several years now yet the first part of this book had me pulling my hair out (whats left of it). Setting up the environment is tricky and it probably would of helped me if I had a stronger background in OO programming. With that said, this is a good book and I would recommend it to any intermediate level PHP developer.

Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Prof...
by David Golding
Amazon Price: $28.37
Customer Review: I've found a few tutorials on the web that explain the very basics of CakePHP. They help you build super-simple applications with databases that only have one table in them. For me, trying to get to the next step has been frustrating.

That's where this book comes in. David Golding takes you from the very basics to building something more complicated. And while he does this, he e...

Beginning XML, 4th Edition (Programmer to Programmer)
by David Hunter, Jeff Rafter, Joe Fawcett, Eric van der Vlist, Danny Ayers, Jon Duckett, Andrew Watt, Linda McKinnon
Amazon Price: $23.99
Customer Review: This book is very concise and it tells a lot about the subject including other topics such as XSLT, RSS, and many other web technologies related to XML. Would highly suggest buying.

Programming PHP
by Rasmus Lerdorf, Kevin Tatroe, Peter MacIntyre
Amazon Price: $26.39
Customer Review: Don't get me wrong, the book is okay. But I feel O'Reilly simply slung out a new version of the book for PHP 5, without really updating the content to reflect PHP 5's enhancements. Especially the chapter covering OOP development with PHP 5. The content in that chapter is pure PHP 4. Not cool.


PHP and MySQL Web Development (3rd Edition) (Developer's Library)
by Luke Welling, Laura Thomson
Amazon Price: $29.99
Customer Review: I find this book very easy to understand and follow. The code is well explained except in some cases. For example the Page Class in Listing 6.1 uses the function htmlentities() but this function was not defined anywhere so it is left up to the reader to guess its implementation. I find this very frustrating. Also in the section on regular expressions on page 126 it is said "Note that when a dot is...