I must say, that I have become spoiled with many books now having a “Who should read this book” section, which this book is lacking. Now that being said, once I really sunk my teeth into it, this book turned out to be quite nice. At a quick glance, this book seemed to be geared toward a more advanced crowd, but upon closer examination, it is really good for novices as well.

Installing and configuring a test system is a must for this type of book, and this one did a great job of covering how to set up the machine in enough detail to get the job done without too much pain.

Error and Exception handling always seem to be left out in books, and from what I have seen from many applications, the developers, in turn, leave it out of their code. This book has a whole section dedicated to this, which I feel is wonderful, since I am big on trapping know and unknown errors as a common practice. This is great coverage, not only for a more stable application, but also a more secure application. The Error logging section was a nice addition, since it can help immensely when tracking down an intermittent issue.

As I have a history of developing some pretty intense data mining, data manipulation, and data analysis applications, I was quite impressed with the level of detail in which the author went into, especially when it came to manipulating HTML page data. An added extra was the word counting routine, which is a great asset when weighing words on a page.

File and OS interaction is always an interesting challenge when developing cross platform applications. Again, the level of detail that the author went into here was excellent.

In the last PHP book that I read, PEAR was not mentioned. I liked that book, but after reading about PEAR in this book, I feel that it was a great choice for the author to include it. The author went into great detail to make it clear how easy it is to download and install packages to make development easier. But wait, it gets even better… He also went into great detail on how to install a PEAR package if the right install is not available. From past PERL experience, it’s nice to have a workaround to install uncooperative packages/modules due to access restrictions, etc.

Overall, I was very pleased with the book, and learned a lot. I feel that it is a valuable asset to my collection.