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This book is not one of the usual line of programming books, with narratives that teach you about a topic, perhaps show a few examples, then move onto the next topic. Books that you would perhaps sit down and read a couple of chapters of at a time. This is, as the title claims, a cookbook. It is still laid out in chapters, with topics such as 'Workingwith Strings', 'Dates and Times' and 'Associative Arrays', in total 23 chapters, plus some miscellaneous Appendixes. Inside each chapter there are a series of sections (recipes), such as 'Computing Union, Intersection, or Difference of Unique Arrays', a problem statement, a solution expressed as code fragments and a discussion section explaining why the code works and why it is a good solution. It does not attempt to teach you about basic PHP syntax; rather it assumes you have acquired some foundation knowledge from elsewhere, but not yet got to the 'expert' stage.

The bad bits. Some of the recipes are a bit simple, even for new comers to PHP and some of the more complex ones just use an external library, which whilst probably a good solution does not help in understanding PHP. The good bits. Pretty much everything else. There are many excellent examples of PHP and I had numerous 'That's neat' thoughts while I was reading this book.

I think almost all PHP users who are between the 'absolute beginner' and 'expert' stages would benefit from this book. It is a book not to store on the bookshelf, but have open on your desk while you are coding.

Recommended.