Re: PHP Books

Don't know any of those but the books I have experience with so far (as a newbie with less than 2 weeks' PHP experience and next-to-no programming experience generally): 'Programming PHP' - Rasmus Lerdorf & Kevin Tatroe (O'Reilly) - straight from the horse's mouth, as it were. Excellent book which quickly demystified sessions and security issues for me. Still grappling with the Objects chapter, but getting there. It's not a beginner's book to programming, but does a good job of explaining PHP. Highly recommended. 'PHP & MySQL for Dummies' - Janet Valade - not a bad primer, but I very quickly outgrew it. Found I was working stuff out for myself before I got to the relevant chapters in the book. 'PHP Developer's Cookbook' - Sterling Hughes with contributions by Andrei Zmievski (Sams). Still playing with this one. Definitely not for beginners as it assumes (IMHO) a fairly well-developed familiarity with PHP concepts and procedures and general wirehead argot. But I get the feeling that I'll be turning to this one more and more as it is a resource of solutions to specific problems. About to delve into 'Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL' - Hugh Williams & David Lane (O'Reilly), which I think is looking promising.