You're absolutely right, Thomas, you don't NEED a book. There are many tutorials ranging from excellent to awful out there. Yes, PHP and MySQL have extensive documentation. And, yes, this is an excellent book. This isn't open source vs. the evil empire. Having an incremental, well structured tutorial that builds on itself can greatly speed the learning process. Text books that aren't just rehashes of man pages are very welcome on my bookshelf. Maybe you can learn a new language for breakfast. Maybe you don't mind spending the time sifting through the disjointed, out dated, uneven and unverified material on the web. I wish I were as clever.
I depended on the 1st edition to get me up to speed. It provided me the foundation to be able to understand the documentation that came with the distributions. It save me countless hours of thrashing around looking for answers. I've had the 2nd edition for about a month now and find that it is a good update and will remain my first go-to reference. As has been stated many times it's often a tradeoff between money out of my wallet and time spent searching for answers. Both approaches have their value but this book is worth its price many times over in saved time and decent solutions. Learning the hard way may offer bragging rights. Give me a good textbook anytime.
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You're absolutely right, Thomas, you don't NEED a book. There are many tutorials ranging from excellent to awful out there. Yes, PHP and MySQL have extensive documentation. And, yes, this is an excellent book. This isn't open source vs. the evil empire. Having an incremental, well structured tutorial that builds on itself can greatly speed the learning process. Text books that aren't just rehashes of man pages are very welcome on my bookshelf. Maybe you can learn a new language for breakfast. Maybe you don't mind spending the time sifting through the disjointed, out dated, uneven and unverified material on the web. I wish I were as clever.
I depended on the 1st edition to get me up to speed. It provided me the foundation to be able to understand the documentation that came with the distributions. It save me countless hours of thrashing around looking for answers. I've had the 2nd edition for about a month now and find that it is a good update and will remain my first go-to reference. As has been stated many times it's often a tradeoff between money out of my wallet and time spent searching for answers. Both approaches have their value but this book is worth its price many times over in saved time and decent solutions. Learning the hard way may offer bragging rights. Give me a good textbook anytime.