PHP: 20 Lessons to Successful Web Development 1st Edition

This might be a good book for an absolute beginner. For others, it would be a good but extremely minimalist review of PHP. I have not been able to find the "archived program files" at the url given. That's not much of a hinderance as anyone beyond a rank beginner can probably figure out what needs to be coded. I spent most of my time writing code to display the PHP and the results of each program. At least I got lots of practice using double and single quotes!If one gets stumped while not being able to see authors code examples, you can look at it in the videos that are available. The book consists of mostly the transcripts of the video. One can see the entire code in the video, however, so the lack of text files is not a big loss.The author is very encouraging with comments such as; "you can now call yourself a PHP programmer". This is after barely 129 pages in 13 chapters. Those are pretty short "chapters" and the programs are very basic. Unless the student continues to modify or expand on these programs, she is not likely to grasp how the pieces will combine and interact.The best part of the book is the "Self-Test" questions at the end of each "chapter". It appears that allowing 10 questions per chapter was the guiding principle in determining how long each chapter was to be. However, these questions are the only thing that makes the book worthwhile. Otherwise, one would gain just as much information by simply watching the videos.

I purchased the Kindle version of this book and have found it to be very helpful to learn PHP. Here's what I like about it:- Designed for the absolute beginner. No prior experience is expected.- Simple coding examples that you can try out; makes it fun and easy to learn the language.- The first 10 lessons focus on the key fundamentals of the language that are needed for success (create variables, arrays, conditions, loops, functions, etc.) The next 10 lessons focus upon more advanced skills, such as creating and working with objects, superclasses, subclasses, creating web forms, handling errors, accessing cookies and files, authenticating sessions, etc.- This author knows how to teach absolute beginners. The book goes at a slower approach, but when you finish, you'll feel like you have a fairly good grasp of the language. I know that it's been a HUGE help to me. :-)

Very pleased I bought this book, it is concise and very helpful for beginners.

Better, free resources available online.