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.

No Starch Press has officially released their PHP title "Wicked Cool PHP" (Real-World Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems).

Here's a bit from the press release:

Wicked Cool PHP [...] is a different breed of PHP book. It's made specifically for the developer who wants to know how to get things done without mucking around and wasting a lot of time. This is not a weighty PHP complete reference or bible that threatens to take down your bookshelf and the rest of the bookcase. This is a book for coders to pick up and use, not wade through.

It provides the reader with "76 immediately useful PHP scripts" that do a variety of things like send/receive email notifications, do some web scraping, track users with cookies and sessions and use web services like SOAP.

You can find out more about the book on this page on the O'Reilly website. The book will officially hit the stands February 15th.