This is a typical offering from O'Reilly's Learning series. It's aimed at those trying to get a proper background and understanding of php (as opposed to those who just want a reference to dip into to get snippets of code). There is a lot of text and the book explains what's going on in a very easy manner. It's well written and easy to read for a technical book. Despite being aimed at properly learning the subject, the book does also have something to offer as a desk reference. All of the code that I have used from it so far works well and, unlike some of the more basic books I've read on the subject, the examples are quite thorough in that they encourage you to get into good practices rather than just giving you "hello world" type examples. ( )