Rating: 
Summary: Good for a beginner
Review: I used this book to learn the fundamentals of PHP and mySQL. It has proven useful for that purpose. Once you start getting more serious about your PHP/mySQL programming, I suggest you buy a seperate book devoted to PHP. However, I do believe this book is adequate for most mySQL queries.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book for beginners at first
Review: I wanted to learn PHP and MySQL but I was a complete novice before buying this book. This books was a great investment in gaining knowledge for both php, mysql and putting the two technologies together. My only complaint is that by the end of the book the author seemed to have gotten really lazy. The examples wont work at shown especially chapter 12: Building a Members Only Web Site" All in all, this book is a good reference for novices. Once you're out of the novice stage, do expect to buy another book; one that is more indepth. Good luck.
Rating: 
Summary: Lousy
Review: I was a complete novice to PHP and MySQL before buying this book, and after purchasing it, found it to be worthless. The installation instructions did not work, so I ended up having to install from downloaded sources. Only a few of the test scripts worked, which was rather annoying as I couldn't tell if the installs were successful. I can write my own and they work, but if I copy one from the CD, and change the log-in info for MySQL to the pertinent information, the scripts fail to do anything. Instead of choosing to show MySQL account info during the installation, it is covered three chapters later (chapter 5 versus 2) for some odd reason... This made for lots of confusion as i was trying to establish and limit accounts right after installation, not two chapters later after the databases were created. She should have kept all of the relevant information together.
One fine example of this book's shortcomings... the author seems to assume that you will be creating a database every time you log into MySQL. Therefore, she makes no mention of the 'USE database' command, which will let you view/add/or edit tables in a particular database. Without using this command, you cannot 'USE' or view a database, you get a 'no database selected' error.
Between these things and the non-working scripts, this book is garbage. You have someone that knows the material, but since they know it so well, they don't know how to lay it out for a newbie. Sam's Teach Yourself in 24 Hours books are the way to go if you actually want to be productive and have a working knowledge of the subject. I had to do that and I will never look back.
Rating: 
Summary: banging my boody head against the screen in frustration
Review: i'll keep this review tio the point. when learning something, I like to have straightforward tutorials that guide me step-by-step through the process of creating something. i dislike having to read through mountains of theory before even getting to a halfway decent practical. it's ok as a reference, but i felt that it didn't really give me a good enough start to utilse it as such.
i'm back to square one - looking through web page tutorials. that will teach me not to read other customer reviews!
Rating:
Summary: Not impressed
Review: I'm a newbie to PHP and MySQL. I was hoping to find a good tutorial based book on the subject, but this was not it. I guess I should've known better than to get a Dummies book as these are really only reference books. However, this isn't even good for a reference. The examples are very short and do not explain what's going on very well. For example, table joins. This is the point I'm stuck on now, which is a very important part of using a database, yet the author glossed over it in less than two pages. Now I'm just frustrated because I'm in the middle of a web project and am left hanging. I should've listened to other reviewers and got PHP & MySQL Web Development. If you're a complete beginner as I am, skip this one or you'll be lost and frustrated.
Rating:
Summary: So - So....
Review: I'm not terribly impressed here. Sure it will help you get up to speed and offers a good introduction to basic PHP functions, but it really doesn't explain WHAT the code does, just that you need to type it in :). I had previously read ASP for dummies (and still use it as a reference) so this book is a bit disappointing.
Rating:
Summary: Simple errors cause big problems
Review: It's a good thing PHP and MySQL have such an extensive following or this book would be burned at the stake. Just a couple of examples: the function "isset" isn't even in the index so good luck finding it in the book (unless you want to read through it again). Nowhere in the book does it explain that when you encrypt a password into MySQL, you can NOT decrypt it. It has no mention of MD5 or AES_ENCRYPT, other alternatives for MySQL encryption. As mentioned in another post, many of the samples have errors including the two projects at the end, i.e., unset($do). POST or GET? If you don't catch this, you'll spend a few hours trying to figure out the problem.
I certainly would not rely on this book alone to satisfy your needs. Even if you're just developing a simple page, you might find yourself frustrated over the books uses of variables and constants. An earlier post said it's not the authors fault. Well, whoever or whatever, just find a companion book to help and be prepared to subscribe to many forums (because even the online documentation for PHP and MySQL can leave you lost in a split-second).
Rating: 
Summary: Good Reading, Good Reference
Review: Ms. Valade's book is a solid intro to the dynamic duo of PHP & MySQL, with an excellent running example throughout the book to bring it all together. Although it's difficult to write a book that's both readable cover-to-cover AND accessible for quick-lookup references when you need them, this one does well at both. After reading the book, I converted one of my web sites from static HTML to PHP and MySQL, and collapsed the number of pages from around 450 to under 50 ( http://www.historicelizabethcity.org ).
I've read the other reviews of this book, and it's unfair to beat up on the book for Amazon's quirks. Make sure you order the current edition (the 2002 edition is, as you'd expect, woefully out of date, but Amazon will gladly sell it to you if you let them). And it's not Ms. Valade's fault if download of the e-book doesn't work.
It's been my experience that Ms. Valade is responsive to e-mails, so if you have a beef with Amazon, complain to Amazon. If you have questions about the book, Ms. Valade has a good track record for helpful responses.
Rating:
Summary: Muy Bueno
Review: Muy bueno si es para principiantes, si es alguien en conocimientos avanzados,no creo que le sirva de mucho, yo como buen "Dummie", me sirvio =)
Rating:
Summary: Great starter book
Review: Overall I think this book gave me a great start in PHP. Other reviews seem to think the same. For me however it had real examples that I could put to use right away. It is concise and easy to follow. I am not generally a fan of the Dummies' book format but it works, The most glaring problem with this book is that many of the examples in the book, particularly the membership example has an unbelievable amount of typos and capitalization errors that have to be debuged before the script could possible work at all. Makes you feel kind of ripped off. I still recommend it to anyone who wants to get up and running fast. This book won't bury you in detail your not ready for.
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