Good article, very well written. I'm sure there are some people who liked Wrox, however. In fact, there was a post about a week and a half to two weeks ago that asked if Wrox was still in existance. I, on the otherhand, don't really care either way: I've never bought anything from Wrox, nor do I plan to. I don't really need the books anyway, as I probably know most of the stuff about as well as the author.
I've a note, however: it's debt, not dept. 
Thanks for your comments. I just wrote the article real quick actually - I didn't put it through a spellchecker as 'Wrox-bashing' really isn't worth the effort =)
I only found "J2EE: Design and Development" to be really well written, but that was done by a single author and he's extremely knowledgeable and experienced with J2EE; I enjoyed his book very much.
I have read a few others out of obligation. I've never really liked them much. I enjoy Addison Wesley books the most since they aquire the best authors and talk about complex concepts. Lately, over the last couple of years, I haven't read much software stuff as it all seems the same to me and I'm a skilled enough to design any application on any platform.
I'm not really sure what I'm going to do next though. I have looked at all the companies in my city (small city), but I don't really like their objectives and the projects they are working on. Many of them are using software that is completely out of date. I also noticed they don't know how to lead software developers very well and aren't accepting any leadership positions. I guess I'm just a bit picky.
Thanks for responding though. Best Regards,
Ken Egervari
I'm a bit confused about this, Ken. Your article at Extreme PHP dates from 28th April 2002, or it appears to do so. The article you've republished here is a copy of that article. It is now 20th March 2003 and Wrox appears to be alive and kicking, or at least their website is. Am I missing something?
I agree that the Handbook series is a total rip-off, but Wrox has produced some excellent books (e.g. Beginning PHP4). The company, and other similar publishers, has to find a way of producing good books for less than the average current price of US$40. It's just too much for most people, unless the books are a career investment. No wonder they can't sell more than 1000 copies. Their marketing department appears to be incompetent. O'Reilly sells well in German translation, for example, but I saw the first Wrox German edition only last week. O'Reilly has been swamping the lucrative German market for years and are well established with almost no serious competition.
So what's the deal? Is Wrox bankrupt or not? Any updates much appreciated.
Thanks
Norman 
The first book i read on PHP was Wrox Beginning PHP4, and that was specificaaly for one or two chapters. (About 1.5-2 years ago)
However, the source code offered on CD didn't work, I never got any replies from their support group, and now that I've done quite a few PHP/mySQL projects i realize I don't like their coding methods!
Wrox site/support sucked big time!
I consider my money totally wasted.
The book is in my library, collecting dust!
Kamy
That's really interesting, Kamy. I'm a PHP newbie and have learned most of the little I know from this website and from Wrox. I'd be genuinely interested in finding out why the examples in Beginning PHP4 are bad. Could you give some more detail about what you don't like about Beginning PHP4, because it could save me (and other people) a lot of time and pain both now and in the future?
Thanks very much for any guidance you can offer
Norman
Norman Graham,
The article was written yesturday. eXtremePHP (the software) was released at that date.
Norman Graham,
The professional version is much better, although it's still not as good as it could have been (yes, I participated on that one). PHP XML was probably the best book, mainly because most of the authors took more action in shaping it. Believe it or not, Wrox has a policy where "the authors on a particular book cannot work together". How screwed up is that? Now you know why there is no vision or strategy to these books.
What I didn't like was their lack of discipline in coding standards.
A simple example; for some if statements they didn't use {}, I know it worked, but made debugging hell.
They didn't use any shortcuts, neither tried to use logical functioins. I know this comes to programmers taste and style, but there are things that most of us do not out of habit, but rather because it makes sense.
I haven't looked at the book for a while, so I'm going by memory here.
anyways, that was my two cents....
Kamy
Well i havent wasted any money on Books or any PHP Books on that matter. Although yes you can learn a lot quicker with some examples and getting into a bit more depth than the Manual itself. I still cant justify how they can make money especially out of a open source language. The person who creates the PHP like Zend had a book which i could see in the bookshop id probably go and buy it.
Like i said i never have bought a book on PHP or any language. But im quite shocked on what has happened with WROX i thought it was until now a respectiable company. Its good to know from a author what really happened behind the scenes.
Yes, Kamy, the coding is certainly lacking in discipline (e.g. no discussion of single v. double quotes but inconsistent use of both all over the place) and there are some features of the code which are introduced for the first time and then never explained, which is very confusing for a beginner. And yes, there is a paragraph about sloppy coding but then a plethora of examples in which they play fast and loose with the coding themselves. Most frustrating for a beginner who would like to do things properly from day 1.
I'm not sure what you mean by logical functions, though. Can you explain?
Btw Planetsim, there is an O'Reilly book by Rasmus, which would sort of meet your criteria of looking for the original source. I have to say I didn't buy it because I feared that Rasmus' casual genius might be a bit tough going for a complete beginner. Having said that, I haven't actually looked at the content in any detail. On the other hand, I've found O'Reilly very thorough and consistent so far (XHTML and Javascript already on my shelf). Decisions, decisions ...
At the end of the day I need a book. I read about PHP on the train on the way to work. It's the only peaceful half hour in my day.
Norman
in my opinion the O'Reilly-logo on their books is pretty much a quality assurance.. I've read several books on topics like DNS, Apache, PHP and so on from various publishers, but none have been as good as the O'Reilly books. This is, of course, just my point of view.
I'm not really capable of telling wether the books from O'Reilly are suited for newbies though, since I've never really been a newbie when I've bought books.. I've always started out with reading newsgroups, boards and manuals..
// Olle
Just for fun, like, I sent Wrox an e-mail this morning and got the reply back already. Wrox is totally dead, including the forums, the ASP/C#.today stuff, Glasshaus, Friends of Ed, Curlingstone ... the whole shebang. All employees were made redundant last Friday.
Not a word about this on the website - it still looks like business as usual and they're still encouraging people to take out subscriptions.
Sounds like they were victims of themselves.
Norman