I liked the PHP crashcourse at the beginning it got me up to speed with PHP. The next section covers using MySQL. Which I thought was also good because it explains MySQL just enough to use it in this context. The book covers security and authentication next and I'm still a little fuzzy on using sessions, especially session variables. I think the explaination of the relationship between PHP and HTML session varibles could have been better. The book concludes with example applications like an online store with shopping cart and a web forum. I liked this section because they show just how to do complex applications. However, the explaination of the code in this section can be hard to follow because of the authors use of libraries. A code snippet might contain several function calls all of which reside in different libraries, files, so you have to go find them to see what they do then come back to the orignial snippet. Overall I thought it was a good introduction to the topic and I learned a lot, not having any previous knowledge of PHP or MySQL.