Despite the fact that this book is marketed as an easy, fun "visual learning" tool, the truth of the matter is that if you're a beginning programmer or even someone who just knows their HTML and CSS and was wondering what all this server side scripting was about, you should give this book a wide berth.
As a student and a web developer, I have often been thrown at one programming language or another and been expected to hit the ground running. The result is that while I know how to use certain languages, the why or how is often fuzzy for me. Thus, I was hoping PHP 5 would clarify for me just what it is php is doing with that mysterious Apache.
Unfortunately, the author(s) simply thrust you into installing Apache and PHP, then telling you that you can use echo statements to insert data into the output stream, something like so:
$time = 'Wednesday';
echo 'It is $time.'
That's great, but...
a) What do echo statements actually DO?
b) What is the output stream?
c) So if I want to display the value of a variable, I just stick the name into the string argument of an echo statement?
d) IS that a string I'm supplying to the echo statement?
e) I'm assuming this means I need to escape any $ characters in case php decides whatever comes after it is a variable name?
f) What happens if it doesn't find any variable named $time?
All this from one innocuous little screenshot. This is fine for people who already know what they're doing, but if you're not prepared to puzzle out the answers to these questions and more, or if you have no idea what those questions even mean, I'd suggest waiting for Head First's take on PHP, as the Head First series is much, much more friendly to beginners:
Head First PHP & MySQL