This book by David Sklar, is a great introduction for those with little or no experience doing web programming (or even programming at all :-). He takes the reader from the basic ideas behind programming for the web using PHP, to the basis of the language, to more complex topics dealing with generation and consumption of content in different formats (e.g. RSS feeds, PDF files, etc.).
There are several things I particularly like about this book, one is that it does not shy away from introducing beginners to concepts that initially could be difficult, but are useful and critical in the long run for good web programming. It deals, for example, with multidimensional arrays in a clearly written (albeit a tad short) section of the book, in a chapter explains in good detail the technology and mechanics of web sessions, it even has a chapter that whets the beginner's appetite by giving a taste for what other things can be accomplished using PHP (CLI programming, classes and objects, advanced math, encryption).
I got an iBook a couple of months ago now, and really needed something like this O'Reilly book to understand the non-Unix things in Mac OS X. Bought the book (at my local bookstore) a couple of days after I got my iBook, and read it during the weekend. The good thing is that it's given me a better grasp of that Operating System, but there are some minor omissions and errors on things that (at least for me) are important, for example the problems with the PHP shipped with Mac OS X: even though there is a /System/Library/PHP directory (which is empty), the libraries (both loadable libs from C extensions and PEAR packages) are in /usr/lib/php (the loadable extensions would be put in the extensions sub directory).
Servicios Web en Bioinformática
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