A comprehensive introduction and quick go-to reference manual that doesn't forget to mention the latest advancements in PHP programming practices, such as the OOP approach and the use of the PDO abstraction layer for interacting with databases. However, don't expect this book to help you bring any practical project to fruition: it will cover the theory, and rather extensively for being an introductory text, but you'll have to look somewhere else for the practice. I particularly enjoyed the focus on the security best practices to correctly configure and secure your server (be it local or virtual) and sanitize the UI implementation to mitigate the most common attacks, such as XSS and CSRF. It really does start from zero as it states in the title, guiding you through the most common aspect of PHP, MySQL, jQuery and much more with easy to understand examples.