Wow, what a beast of a book! And I mean that in the most loving of ways. I signed on to co-author this book nearly one calendar year ago (about three mental years!), and it grew to nearly take over my life as the difficulties of executing a Head First treatment of two loosely connected technologies revealed themselves. Sure, PHP and MySQL are tightly integrated in a technical sense, which is a very good thing. But Head First books aren't just technical books, they're conceptual books, and server-side scripting is conceptually a whole different animal than web databases.

It's done now, and will be shipping by the end of this month, December '08. And it works. Maybe it won't work for everyone. But I think it will do what no book has done yet in teaching you how to do interesting and powerful things with PHP and MySQL, while at the same time learning best practices about web application development in general. This is not an A-Z book on the PHP language or MySQL syntax, so look elsewhere if that's what you want. This book is an immersive experience where you are dropped into several real world (OK, maybe slightly bizarro world) scenarios that require a heavy and creative dose of PHP and MySQL to resolve. The focus is never on learning topic X, but instead on solving problem X, which flows directly from a real need. That tends to be how learning works in the real world - few of us have the luxury to learn purely for learning's sake.

I sincerely hope you check out the book and it helps you to learn not one, but two extremely handy web technologies. And after you build that killer new PHP/MySQL web app, post it up on here or Head First Labs so you can get some much deserved "nerd street cred."