Re: PHP book recommendations>

I second O'Reilly's PHP Cookbook. Another recommendation is Larry Ullman's books, especially HP Advanced for the World Wide Web. I try to triangulate, using several books that come at the code differently. Jud. Judson Vaughn jud@seitervaughn.com | jud@bizville.com Seiter Vaughn Communications 12455 Plowman Court Herndon, VA 20170 703.450.9740 svc Matthew Weier O'Phinney wrote:

* Daniel Purdy <daniel.purdy@niicommunications.com>:

[snip] I'm looking for an easy to read PHP book that will help me learn a solid foundation in PHP. I'm already familiar with the language but want to make sure I'm coding in the most efficient manner. What's a few of the better books out there? [/snip] [snip jblanchard:] I personally like the O'Reilly books on PHP, especially the PHP Cookbook [/snip] My personal favorites are the ones with the bright red covers published by wrox (they are usually just titled the language, so in this case PHP). I have found they provide excellent quick reference and also are great for sitting down and reading through to get a better grasp of the language. HTH!

I cannot disagree more. I have a copy of "Professional PHP Programming" from circa 2000. It has a ton of real-world examples... that are completely insecure and display really bad programming habits. Additionally, the function listings at the back are not indexed, so if you don't know, for instance, that the function 'split' is a regular expression function, you'll never find it. The HTML reference was complete fluff (shouldn't have even been in the book). I honestly haven't found an introductory PHP book I could recommend -- I'd look for a good book on programming and/or programming practices for the web, and then figure out how to translate that into PHP (using php.net as a reference).