This Is a great little PHP Handbook
.. and it was my first PHP book, literally, because I remember the cashier scanning this one before the excellent Jason Gilmore book I bought on the same day.

But I’ll focus on this McBride book.

It’s a must have if you’d like to - immediately - have at your disposal everything you need to know in order to code the essential parts of PHP itself, and then create a web page that contains a form. After completing the book, if you want, you’ll be able to complete a working mysql-driven Application where you are now posting information to a table, and then retrieving the information into your web page.

It’s an excellent book, because of the size, to immediately start dipping into for learning PHP and for planning your own web-based app, and not intrude into your time.

After maybe five or six, mini-timeouts of reading this book, while in bed or on the couch, due to the beginner-level pace mixed in with Nat’s humor and the blatant immediate-usefulness-factor of the examples, finally brought me over to that point-of-no-return interest level where I started actually studying the book in depth, ... well, still on my couch, but starting from page 1.

Even though it also includes info on installing Apache and MySql and PHP, I think I’d recommend going with the install instructions from Gilmore’s book or another. Nothing blatantly wrong there, just a suggestion.

It is a really good reference manual, because of the fact that it is small, and Nat McBride had to say "yes" to including only the most used PHP stuff (such as string-handling), and "no" to other stuff that you won’t immediately need, but will find in regular-size books.

Another beginner book that I recommend: W. Jason Gilmore’s Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL.

(It’s weird that this review is semi-long for such a small book)