The title of this book is a little misleading-- I found it to be all about e-commerce, little about PHP 5. (Though all the source code given is PHP 5, it is not a book to teach the reader PHP). It is a very good resource for anyone that needs to run an e-commerce site.



The author provides a brief explanation of why you'd want to write your own e-commerce site, then provides explanations for the handful of design patterns the book will use. Once that's out of the way, it's off to the races as the book builds a rudimentary e-commerce site in the next chapter then incrementally builds on it to provide a very feature-rich web site.



The book covers everything you'd want in a commerce site, to include Products, Categories, User Accounts, Payments, Vouchers, Discounts, User Reviews, Search, etc. etc. The author clearly has given a lot of thought to enumerating the features you'd want and provides very readable examples of how each of these can be implemented. The book finishes with recommendations on some odds and ends like lost password recovery and connecting to external services.



I found the source code (and Database DDL) to be well written and very easy to understand. Even if you're not a PHP coder, you should find little problem in understanding the source code.



If you're looking for a book to teach you PHP 5, this isn't the right book for you. But if you're looking for a book to teach you about building an MVC application (or an e-commerce site) the book will have something for you.