of detail that is covered can easily overwhelm someone, I've resorted to reading one or two chapters a weekend so I can properly process everything. Not withstanding, Kevin manages to cover several low level subjects in-depth (sockets, streams, etc) and for the most part his writing is engaging and somewhat entertaining, there were things skipped though, advanced topics that are referenced and not really covered in-depth (this is an issue as with PHP there aren't a lot of users who do bitwise operations, as an example, on a regular basis). I would highly recommend this book to someone who's spent some time in the software development world and has some experience with C or advanced PHP topics, this is not a book for a beginner or those that don't have a good grasp on the fundamentals of computer science. Also take heed, this book covers things that you can do as an example of what's possible, just because you can do something doesn't always mean you should. i.e. Writing a HTTP Daemon in PHP vs. C/C++.