PHP, The Complete Reference may be a good book to start learning from. In addition, it does touch on most of the major topics.

However, calling it "Complete" is a joke. I have been writing software for over 40 years, and this is the first language "reference" book I have found that does not fully describe the built-in functions supported by the language. For example, on pages 82-84 the author lists about 100 string functions in a 2 column table. The first column is the function name, and the 2nd column is a single phrase that states the purpose of the function. No syntax is shown, no arguments, no return value information and no usage information. In the few pages that follow, there are in-line examples of a couple of the 90+ functions.

The same is true for other groups of functions. Having to go online to find out information that should be in a "complete reference" obviates the need for a book. At the price charged for this book, you'd be better off using the abundant information available online.

This book is okay as a beginning reference. The title may give the impression that it's a book you'll want to keep on your shelf and return to frequently for years to come. That probably won't be the case for most readers who go on to write a lot of PHP, so a better title might have been "Getting Started with PHP", or something like that. The banner on the back of the book, which says "Your One-Stop Guide to Web Development with PHP", is a lot more predictive of the book's contents.

It contains a lot of fluff that fills way more pages than are justified for the amount of information given, such as examples built-up in stages, leading to a lot of needlessly redundant example code. This might make sense for complex examples, but the examples in this book are all very simple, so the extra use of paper is wasteful.

Personally, I don't like the author's tendency to follow his own explanations with expressions like "Not bad!", "Nice!", and "Pretty good!". I appreciate when authors use a conversational tone to some extent (Scott Meyers is the best at this, I think), but doing this constantly throughout the book goes too far for my taste. Others might enjoy this style of writing though.

I would say this book seems to be targeted toward readers who are absolutely new to programming. If you're coming from any kind of programming background at all, or like to be challenged, then you might not be very satisfied with this book. One good thing is that it's so simple and the examples take up so much space, you can read the whole thing in just a few hours.

I've also noticed quite a few typos, even in the example code (e.g. "close" where they meant "clone"), but I don't see an erratum posted on the McGraw-Hill website yet. I'm sure that's because the book was published only recently. The source code is all there though, as advertised. Still, it would have been nice if they'd done a better job of editing the text.

Maybe the overall nature of this book is consistent with "The Complete Reference" series by McGraw-Hill. This was the first title I'd read in that series, so I had no certain expectations. In the future, I'll know better what to expect from "The Complete Reference" books.

As a software developer, I primarily work with the ASP.NET technology and have been learning to apply Ajax to my work. A small segment of my work is with PHP/MySQL. I picked-up this book at Barnes & Noble (my Sunday library and Starbucks experience) and found the subject of Ajax to be very well explained.

I purchased this book solely for the Chapters 12 and 13 coverage of Ajax and have found it to be worth the purchase price alone. I look forward to reading the rest of the book as a refresher for my PHP development.