Kae Verens has posted a review of another of Packt Publishing's PHP-related offerings, "Learning PHP Data Objects" by Dennis Popel (published in Aug 2007).

Learning PHP Data Objects, by Dennis Popel, is an introduction to PDO, which walks through the building of a believable test example - a library manager for your home library. [...] I really couldn't find very much about this book that I didn't like. Ignoring the appendices, the book is 154 pages purely devoted to teaching PDO through examples, including error handling, working with BLOBs, even the creation of the M in MVC (Models).

The review mentions Models, Active Record and how the book creates a Library manager application that includes the use of prepared statements and transactions.