Why is this "hot"? Because developers have zero attention span for paragraphs of text. You can literally keep the book open while coding, glance right for the syntax, glance left for the "why," and keep moving. No scrolling, no video buffering.
Many modern developers rely on ORMs like Eloquent (Laravel) or Doctrine. This book strips that away—you learn raw SQL and PHP database interaction first. That knowledge never expires. When an ORM fails or becomes slow, the developer who learned from Murach can drop down to PDO and fix it. murachs php and mysql 4th edition hot