PHP and MySQL Web Development

Rating:
Summary: Simple, effective, potent
Review: PHP and MySQL Web Development was my first PHP book. My previous experience with PHP was simple stuff like looking at and altering mailing scripts and news scripts from popular sites like Hotscripts.com.

After reading this book for at least 6 months now I can recommend this book with 5 stars, two thumbs up, and a pat on the back. What is also helpful is the book comes with a CD rom containing the example scripts layed out in the book. Very helpful if you don't understand what the book is getting at and you need some hands on experience.

For example, the Mailing List Manager script has helped me tenfold in setting up a bulletproof newsletter script. I use it for myself, clients, and friends who need a lean script with a MySQL backend and easy to maintain lists. Best of all, it is easy to use and update for people who know nothing about coding and site design.

So in final word, get this book. If you are a beginner or expert PHP developer, it is a helpful reference.

Rating:
Summary: Well written introduction to two vital products
Review: PHP and MySQL are probably the most pervasive add-ons to Apache web servers across the web. Certainly they are both easy to acquire and common on a large range of web hosting systems, including several extremely low cost ones. They also fit together extremely well.

This book demonstrates how well. It starts out with a quick course in PHP (OK, 160 pages is hardly quick but it seems to move along at a good pace), follows it up with a brief look at MySQL before a short digression on E-commerce leads into building authentication and secure systems with the two tools (a marvellous place to start when you're thinking about commercial-grade web systems.)

After some more advanced PHP the book then goes on to give marvellous examples of web applications, a shopping cart, content management system, email service, mailing list manager and web forums. Finally it has a good chapter on generating PDF files using PHP.

Overall the book is well written, well structured and can take someone with some programming knowledge and no experience with PHP and MySQL all the way to the development of full scale database backed web applications.

That's not to say that the book doesn't have some shortcomings. You will want to have some program design experience and preferably some experience with database design as these are given short shrift. The book also lacks examples and discussion of some of the less database intensive parts of PHP and some of the more obscure taks you may need to perform. However it does provide an excellent introduction to these two products for someone, like myself, who already has some experience. It must also be added that there are some typographical errors in some of the code examples, not too many and not too serious but in this day and age why can't authors cut and paste from running and debugged code, Kernighan and Plauger managed it more than twenty years ago in "Software Tools."

I would recommend purchasing this book and "PHP Developer's Cookbook" for the perfect PHP bookshelf. If you wish a fuller understanding of MySQL and database design then add "MySQL" by Paul DuBois and Michael Widenius.

I rate it as four stars rather than five, only because it is not perfect and so many others have given it five.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Wow! This is a well written, well planned, and fantastically useful book on how to set up a database-driven web site. (If you don't know what a database-driven web site is, this is the book for you.)

The authors, Luke Welling and Laura Thomson, have clearly done their homework on their audience. They have written a book that provides easy, step-by-step instructions on creating the components that web site owners want, including:

- Password protect your site - how to create user authentication. Includes a section on generating random passwords and mailing them to the user.
- Build a personalized shopping cart
- Personalize web content based on session control
- A content management system - a web-based system for non-computer users to add new stories without touching an HTML editor
- Mailing list manager; mail HTML or text-based mail to everyone on your list automatically
- Web forums for user discussions
- Automated content retrieval off of the web (get stock quotes automatically from other web sites, etc.)
- Setting up simple file transfer functions (FTP) for uploading files
- Automatic simple image generation (i.e. buttons and graphs) - the ideas in this chapter can be easily extended to making page counters, etc.
- Generate personalized PDF files automatically (useful for creating printable, non-editable documents)

In addition to going over the basics of PHP and MySQL, the Authors provide some excellent discussion about setting up good quality e-commerce sites and the use of encryption.

There are a couple of minor shortcomings in this book. The Authors provide only a cursory treatment to using SSL (secure socket layers) in web transactions. SSL is an essential component of modern day e-commerce, and I would have liked to have seen a more detailed discussion about setting up and running SSL; oddly, the authors recommend buying a $1000 server package with preconfigured SSL rather than using the open souce SSL package which is available from the Apache website. Secondly, the slant of the book is angled towards Unix/Linux systems (which is not unexpected, as most servers run off of Linux/Unix); Windows users will need to make slight, but not scary, alterations in code. In most cases, the files can be copied straight off the CD and will run equally well in Unix/Linux versus Windows systems.

In summary, this is an outstanding computer book on building a useful and interactive web site, powered entirely by free software. The authors take a complicated subject and make it easy to understand. Rather than focusing on abstract theory or dabbling in mundane details, this book provides step-by-step instructions that lets you set up a full-featured and powerful web site with a minimum of hassle.

Rating:
Summary: 5 Stars No No!!!
Review: I did be better of reading the manual. I spotted several mistakes and several low grade examples which i thought were very decently covered in the manual.Over and above all this, the inconsistent code styles totally put me off.The only saving grace were the case studies.It was definitely not worth the money i spent.

Rating:
Summary: Wow...
Review: This book was great! I have many many thick books on the subject but this stands out. I learn well by scanning through practical projects and that's this book's strong point. I can't vouch for the PHP tutorials (I learned PHP earlier) but the MySQL interaction is great. I keep this right by the 'puter and use it all the time as reference!

Rating:
Summary: A Tremendous Hands-On Asset
Review: This book was great. It provides a great, hands-on guide to using PHP and MySQL. Once especially great feature is the chapter on debugging. This chapter has some good code snippets to show how to integrate debugging into your code and how to think about and classify problems. My only suggestion for future revisions is that, since many PHP features are compiled in. it would be nice to discuss how to figure out what your PHP binary supports if you've just installed an RPM rather than compiling from source.

Rating:
Summary: Great Reading, Great Reference, Great Book
Review: This is one of the best sams books I have bought. I bought this book knowing nothing about mysql or php. This book has great examples and is clear and concise. If you know SQl and already have experience with a server side programming language then you wil have a web application up in a week. Even if you don't know anything about server side programming or sql this book will serve as a great intro for the two. I HIGHLY recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: A Good book
Review: This is a good book...
There is a problem installing from the CD on windows 2000. You have to change the access rights if you are installing on a NTFS drive.

Rating:
Summary: To the point. Perfect book.
Review: I ate this book from cover to cover in about a day and I have been using it as a reference ever since. I knew nothing about PHP and even less about mysql (other than knowing what they were). Within hours I had something decent up and about. Given that 99% of computer books out there are absolutely worthless, this was a refreshing surprise.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Resource for Everyone
Review: This is not only the best PHP / MySQL book I have found, it may be the best web development book as well. Clear, concise, easy to use and find info and.... MIRACULOUSLY - all of the examples work even though it is from the publisher it is from.
If you need just the quick info to get up and running or if you have been tasked with building a complete site - this book is the place to start. I find myself using it all the time and only referring to other books I have for quick reference or EXTREMELY advanced tasks.