As you might see, I have slightly mixed feelings about the book. I think it grew on me as I read more of it, and some of my initial negativity wore off over time. The book does provide a good grounding in OOP and Software Design Patterns. However, it doesn't really go into enough detail when it covers PDO, MySQLi or PEAR::MDB2 for it to be a usable self contained resource. I think it would have been better for the book to drop the section on the home grown MVC framework, and the PHPUnit API and expand some of the examples. It doesn't cover what it does in enough depth on it's own - so don't buy it if you're looking to gain a working knowledge of something it covers (e.g. PDO, AdoDB or the like) from scratch. The book does maintain something like a 50:50 ratio between code and text. At times this does make it feel a little like the author is padding the book with code, and duplicating the API at php.net for no real reason.