Earlier, I posted a sample chapter of PHP and MySQL by Example written by Ellie Quigley with Marko Gargenta. Now I'd like to take a few minutes to do a fly-by of the entire book.

Cal works through some of the chapters talking about their contents, who they're targeted at (where experienced developers can start and stop) and includes a list of the other topics covered between its covers including user defined functions, regular expressions, PHP & MySQL integration, and objects.

Overall, Cal found the book to be a good quality reference tool, but one that focuses a lot more on the basics of programming with PHP and MySQL rather than getting much more high level than touching on OOP or regular expressions.

If you do anything on a website besides sitting in you chair only coding all day long, you owe it to yourself to check out a copy of this book from Prentice Hall - The Design of Sites. Now, I can almost feel the eyes rolling from here even at the mention of this kind of book, but trust me - pick up a copy and thumb through it and you'll see the difference.

Check out the rest of the review here and get more details on the book itself from the Prentice Hall site or from a retailer like Amazon.

Most developers I know of either love or hate Regular Expressions, me personally, I hate them. Yes, they do the job and usually do it elegantly but it's hard to find a more arcane sub-language than regex.

Obviously, the sample chapter talks about regular expressions - specifically what they are, what functions in PHP use them, their use, and enough examples to keep you busy for a long time.

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