I just finished the book (it was great ) and now I'm thinking about getting your other book PHP Advanced and Object-Oriented Programming. I noticed it's from 2012, though... is it still worth buying or should I wait for a new edition?
If you want to print the tax (in dollars) you need to calculate the values separately (i.e. you can't simply add 1 to the tax rate)
$taxrate = $tax / 100;
$total = ($price * $quantity) + $shipping;
$taxvalue = $total * $taxrate;
$grandtotal = $total + $taxvalue;
Same thing happened to me. If I use $_REQUEST instead of $_POST everything works just fine, though.
Adding enctype="form-data/multipart"> makes it work as well. I'm using Safari (on MacOS High Sierra)