If you are completely new to PHP, just forget about this book!
If you are looking for complete programming solutions, do so as well!
However, if you have some basic experience with PHP and MySQL this book is just great.
This book deserves the word "cookbook" as it contains over 600 pages of receipts (do not expect big explanations, but just snippets of code), which will help you to solve many problems. And the best of this book - in my personal opinion - is, that by reading it, you will find a lot of problems/solutions/ideas you have not thought about before.
Be warned: This book is not a real "help" for anybody who looks for the easy solution, but it will definitely help YOU to develop your site and develop yourself.
Just buy it - it's well worth the money and if this book won't pay out, none will!