suggest a PHP book?

[ankur rathi]

Hi,

Please suggest me a good and easy book for PHP?

Some inputs from side:
1. I like the Head First books very much.
2. I am brand new to PHP.

TIA

[Ulf Dittmer]

You'll find reviews of a number of PHP books in the Bunkhouse.

[Maks Zolotarev]

Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites (Animal Guide)
Author: Robin Nixon

PHP and MySQL Web Development (4th Edition)
Authors: Luke Welling, Laura Thomson

Wicked Cool PHP: Real-World Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems
Authors: William Steinmetz, Brian Ward
You can try any free php tutorials to start

PHP for the World Wide Web, Third Edition
Author: Larry Ullman

[Bear Bibeault]

"Strong Mr", please check your private messages for an important administrative matter.

[chris webster]

Not sure how "easy" this is, but if you're looking seriously at working with PHP, I recommend you look at Zend Framework, which is a free, open-source, and very comprehensive set of PHP web development components covering a huge range of functionality e.g. for MVC-style applications, declarative database mappings, and so on. You can just pick the components you need for your application, but they're all based on a common framework, which means it's easy to add in extra components. And it's a lot easier and more effective (and perhaps more reliable) than trying to code your own!

There are some books on ZF, the online documentation is pretty good, and I can also recommend the excellent "Practical Web 2.0 Applications With PHP" by Quentin Zervaas (Apress), which includes some stuff on how to add ZF components to your application.

Finally, the "PHP Cookbook" by David Sklar and Adam Trachtenberg (O Reilly) is always very useful.