On Slashdot.org a new book review has been posted for the third edition of the "Core PHP Programming" book from Prentice Hall publishing, written by Leon Atkinson with Zeev Juraski.

The authors of Core PHP Programming have found a marvelous middle ground. Toward the beginning of the book they have a great deal of light, explanatory material as they cover the basics of PHP. As they move towards more advanced topics there is less explanation and a tighter packing of information. At the same time the book has a large number of small code examples throughout, making sure that you know how to use the functions under discussion.

Always good to hear that a book is better than its predecesor, and that the reviewer could quickly and easily understand what they needed to know.

Taken as a whole it does a good job of covering the whole language and the ways of using it. I can imagine it would make a good companion volume to my other favourite PHP volume, PHP and MySQL Web Development, which tends more towards recipes and leaves out the encyclopedic coverage of this book.