Description:While the book is set up so that the reader should be able to learn "through example," in practice it doesn't really work like that. The author provides examples of what piece of code/function does what and then will provide another example of another function, but won't explain why the two are different other than showing the different outputs they have. He also has a bad habit of only giving a cursory introduction to a concept and then including it in his examples as though the reader is supposed to understand the specifics of how it works. I bought this book because other reviewers said that it may be good for people who aren't familiar with programming concepts, while not providing a good resource for those with a programming background who want to learn PHP (specifically what's new in PHP 5). I got this book because I enjoyed O'Reilly's Learning MySQL. That was a great book that made it easy for a beginner to really dive into the subject matter. That isn't the case with learning PHP 5.