I mainly got this book as a resource for a recent job offering with absolutely no experience writing within the language, and believed that this would be a good resource to be able to utilize for this job. However there are some caveats to this book, that I feel are mainly due to the structure of my work that ends up having me not really utilizing it as much when going into the later chapters, as most of the solution are handled much more by framework basis.

This book, is a solid book in my opinion of being able to get someone who is brand new to programming up and running, with a wide variety of topics to explore, and in that retrospect, in my opinion if you need a book that is a solid foundation to learn a variety of topics, then this is a good start for you to explore, as it will help you to learn terminology that you will need to know later when exploring frameworks.

However, in the sense of the work that I mainly due being through frameworks, what I was mainly hoping from this book is to describe best practices of the many different flavors of php, which it does do in some retrospect, but for most of the topics in this book I hardly ever touch, as they are rarely ever needed. I do still feel this is a solid resource to understand the language as a whole of what it can do, but if you are looking for a book that can describe at a better level best practices, you may need to look elsewhere to cover it.

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I liked it, it’s a good book for someone who wants to learn PHP. However, they don’t talk about any low level details, explain how some functions work under the hood, what’s the complexity or give tips on how to optimize code (and I kinda expected that). Not really a problem, but some other people might need to know that

There's lots of good information in this book, but as it claims to cover PHP 7.4 many of the language improvements appear to be missing. For instance:

There's no mention that you can create arrays with the square bracket syntax: $nums = [1, 2, 3, 4] or $person = ['name' => 'martin']
There's no mention of variadic function parameters: public function sum(…$args){}

So I wonder what else is missing?

Also missing are things most PHP developers take for granted nowadays:
Composer – PHPs defacto package manager.
Autoloading
The various frameworks that exist (Symfony, Laravel etc.)

This feels like a very lazy update to the previous editions.

I liked it, it’s a good book for someone who wants to learn PHP. However, they don’t talk about any low level details, explain how some functions work under the hood, what’s the complexity or give tips on how to optimize code (and I kinda expected that). Not really a problem, but some other people might need to know that

I mainly got this book as a resource for a recent job offering with absolutely no experience writing within the language, and believed that this would be a good resource to be able to utilize for this job. However there are some caveats to this book, that I feel are mainly due to the structure of my work that ends up having me not really utilizing it as much when going into the later chapters, as most of the solution are handled much more by framework basis.

This book, is a solid book in my opinion of being able to get someone who is brand new to programming up and running, with a wide variety of topics to explore, and in that retrospect, in my opinion if you need a book that is a solid foundation to learn a variety of topics, then this is a good start for you to explore, as it will help you to learn terminology that you will need to know later when exploring frameworks.

However, in the sense of the work that I mainly due being through frameworks, what I was mainly hoping from this book is to describe best practices of the many different flavors of php, which it does do in some retrospect, but for most of the topics in this book I hardly ever touch, as they are rarely ever needed. I do still feel this is a solid resource to understand the language as a whole of what it can do, but if you are looking for a book that can describe at a better level best practices, you may need to look elsewhere to cover it.

If you're looking for a book to get a better understanding of PHP and dynamic web sites, this book is pretty good. It doesn't go into deep detail, so that is a bit frustrating because there are some parts that are glossed over, rather than the deep in-depth details that a newbee to dynamic web site development needs.