Usable Shopping Carts

Rating:
Summary: Practical oriented and well-focused
Review: Once again glasshaus delivered a practical oriented and well-focused book. The authors don't waste time, straight to the meat; the book is actually full of well-explained code listings. The sample applications use ASP/SQL server and PHP/MySQL, but a lot of material is still relevant for other technologies, especially the coverage of database design, but also usability, interfaces and workflow
BTW The book is actually 300+ pages long

Rating:
Summary: A full treatment of an e-commerce application
Review: The authors set forth an ambitious goal. In one book, they try to show you how to design and code a full e-commerce application. From laying out the user interface and connecting its interactions with a server running a relational database. For the latter, they spend some time with an extended example that involves constructing a set of interrelated tables, with primary and foreign keys. Those of you already familiar with RDB and the various normal forms will be very comfortable here.

For the actual database, they illustrate with Microsoft SQL and the free MySQL. The code to connect is given in fair detail. Quite aside from anything else, the differences and similarities between these databases can be very useful. You can see the pros and cons of going with either. Heck, if you are searching for a book that compares these 2 common and important databases, this book is a good choice.

The book is a little curious in one way. The authors are clearly skilled, but they don't seem to use the formal Model-View-Controller (MVC) approach. Though you might see that the various pieces and interconnections they give can amount to this. Nor do they explicitly use the idea of an n-tier architecture. Perhaps they chose to omit these ideas to simplify the narrative. Since if you successfully use their ideas to build your application, the MVC and n-tier ideas can then have far more substance to you, when you later encounter them.