ISBN:0764549634Amazon.com
How could the combination of PHP and MySQL--which is feature-rich, highly reliable combination, capable of dealing with large traffic volumes, and absolutely free of charge in most cases--be any better? In MySQL/PHP Database Applications, Jay Greenspan and Brad Bulger explain how to work with the capable pair, primarily for applications you might use on a Web site. If you take the time to study the advice and work through your own tests of the concepts presented, it's pretty much certain that you'll walk away with the knowledge you need to do serious development work with the PHP scripting language and the MySQL database server.
Rather than make up trivial programs just to illustrate aspects of the MySQL/PHP environment, this book features code snippets, each half a page or so in length, that illustrate the behavior of key code structures. For example, in explaining conditional statements in PHP, the book gives you a no-frills IF statement with real values in place. It's not always obvious how the code structures will behave in practice, but the book does a consistently good job of commenting intelligently on the place of each aspect of the language in a well-designed application. The latter half of the book attacks specific problems--a chat system, a guest book, and so on--and walks through the setup of MySQL and each important PHP function for each. --David Wall
Topics covered: The PHP server-side scripting language and the MySQL database server, explained for people who have neither a lot of database administration background nor programming experience. Matters of creating and querying databases, and of performing simple and advanced operations with PHP scripting, are covered adroitly. /p>
Reviews From AMAZON.COM
Loved it!
I'm puzzled by the negative reviews. I'm a 30 year vet in computing, recently retired, and doing web/tech computing part time. I've needed to grasp parts of computing that I haven't been involved with, and boy did these guys get it right!
I loved the comment about "The bulk of this chapter is for those of you who have made it to the early 21st century without working with relational databases!" That's me! And the writing was just right in terms of code hints and kinks along with clear explainations of database concepts.
I'm reading the first edition, saw the second edition was out, and ordered it.
I will agree, however, that there are *many* editing mistakes where they mistake terms or have errors in their tables/code. Hopefully the 2nd edition solves this.
bogus code
Unfortunately for me I spent the $40 for this book. What a mistake!
When I first opened it up I was exited by the project management example in chapter 17. I told my wife I must have it! After I got home and started reading through it I decided to load the sample data into the my htdocs directory in my local Apache install. The nightmare never ended in getting the code to work. And this wasn't because I didn't set up the user accounts in MySQL! After messing around with it all weekend I decided to pay my fried a visit who is an expert web developer (builds web-enabled databases for California lobyists with millions of records). He looked at the code and found constructs that are specific to PHP5. The readme didn't say that I must install PHP5 for the examples to work. Anyway, after changing the code to conform to PHP4 syntax the examples still didn't work.
I'm totally disappointed that I spent my hard earned dollars on this book. If the authors would be kind enough to post some code that works and is easy to follow, that would be a good step at repentance. Oh, one last thing, the authors make use of PEAR; that was a pain to install too. However, I got that working (with no instructions in the book) and the code still fails to work.
Two thumbs down for this book.