In a recent post to his blog Nick Circelli has posted a book review of "Wicked Cool PHP" (from No Starch Press) - a "real world examples" book that drops you right into the code without much of an introduction.

My main reason for this was, from what I hear, that PHP is good for simple projects that need a fast turn around. [...] I starting going through a bunch of lame tutorials on the web, but they're mostly geared for a beginner and there's a lot I can skip over. I decided to get a couple of recommended books on PHP and one that I found very useful is called Wicked Cool PHP: Real-World Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems by William Steinmetz with Brian Ward.

Nick looks at why the book could be useful to other developers out there (nice, clean and short examples including security suggestions) and his opinion on who should read the book.