PHP and MySQL Web Development (3rd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Scads of example applications
Review: In open source usage, the book describes a powerful and popular combination of PHP and MySQL to build websites. Each program has several texts devoted solely to it. But it is in the interaction between the two that often developers need assistance on.

The book does start with chapters exclusively on explaining PHP, and other chapters on MySQL. In themselves, you might find these to be concise and useful explanations.

But the meat of the book is given in several chapters, where each chapter is devoted to making one common application. Like constructing a shopping cart. Or a Web-based email service. These are things that you have surely experienced as a user. Now you get to see how to code them in PHP and MySQL. Which explains some of the book's size. There are 10 chapters in this section. Enough to give you plenty of examples to draw ideas from.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Documentation to Building an Active WebSite
Review: With the newest versions of PHP and MySQL, anyone thinking of building a database driven web site would have to think long and hard about building it using anything but PHP and MySQL. There are just three reasons for this: First the software is damn good. It's solid, fast, reliable and feature rich. Second, the software is basically free. Yes, you can buy support packages for it, but even if you do you are paying a lot less than for commercial packages. Third, the level of documentation that you can get for the software is as good as anything you can get for the commercial packages.

This book is a good example of the latter. It is a specialized book oriented to building a database oriented web site using these two packages. It accomplishes this task exceedingly well. Limited to about a thousand pages, it's enough to get you through the first year or so of building your web site.