Nah, some books are great.

apress are my favourite so far. Everywhere I went looking for books, all I could find were the same old PHP books from various publishers - you know the ones, this is a variable, this is a control structure, this is how you write a basic little form handler script, and aren't you glad you read 500 pages so you could learn the same thing you could learn from the manual in a fifth of that? I went looking on Amazon and found apress/Matt Zandstra's PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice, and Pro PHP, two books I would highly recommend, and I'm not even done reading them yet. Some excellent reference, examples, and a lot of things the manual doesn't go anywhere near covering.
-m