Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition [Paperback]

Cristian Darie (Author), Emilian Balanescu (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 21, 2008 | ISBN-10: 1590598644 | ISBN-13: 978-1590598641 | Edition: 2

Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition covers every step of the design and building process involved in creating powerful, extendable e–commerce web sites. Based around a real–world example involving a web site selling t–shirts, you’ll learn how to create and manage a product catalog, build and integrate a shopping cart, and process customer accounts and PayPal/credit card transactions.

With the e–commerce framework in place, authors Emilian Balanescu and Cristian Darie show you how to integrate advanced features sure to set your web site apart from the competition. You’ll learn how to expand your catalog using Amazon Web Services, optimize the web site for the search engines, and take advantage of Ajax to build an even more user–friendly shopping cart.

Other highlights:

 

• The authors show you how to build a complex, extendable e–commerce web site using sound development practices
• This second edition has been updated to take advantage of a more flexible templating system, and new chapters cover Ajax integration and search engine optimization
• The text goes beyond basic product and customer management, showing you how to integrate product reviews, process payments using both credit cards and PayPal, and expand your web site catalog using third–party services such as Amazons affiliate program

What you’ll learn

 

• Build an extensible e–commerce web site using sound development techniques
• Increase sales through proven techniques such as cross–selling, upselling, and enhancing customer service offerings
• Expand your product and service offerings by integrating with reseller programs such as Amazon Affiliates via XML web services
• Take advantage of search engine optimization techniques to make your web site more easy to find

Who this book is for

This book was written for individuals seeking to build e–commerce web sites using the PHP language and MySQL database.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Cristian Darie is a software engineer with experience in a wide range of modern technologies. He is the author of numerous books, including his popular ASP.NET C# e-commerce tutorial, his Ajax and PHP tutorial, and his search engine optimization tutorial for PHP developers. Cristian studied distributed application architectures for his Ph.D, and is getting involved with various commercial and research projects. When not planning to buy Google, he enjoys his bit of social life. If you want to say "Hi," you can reach Cristian through his personal website, www.CristianDarie.ro.

Emilian Balanescu is a programmer experienced in many technologies, such as PHP, Java, .NET, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MS SQL Server. He works as a wireless network administrator at accessNET International S.A. in Romania, a company that provides fixed wireless access services operating a point-to-multipoint digital radio communication network with national coverage. You can reach Emilian at EmilianBalanescu.ro.

Product Details

• Paperback: 707 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 2 edition (February 21, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590598644
• ISBN-13: 978-1590598641
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #168,084 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Challenging but worth the effort, April 23, 2009

By 

Z. Werner - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition (Paperback)

I have recently completed reading this book in its entirety. First, here's what I liked about this book. This book is a wonderful presentation of how to build an e-commerce site from start to finish. It touches on nearly all the major considerations you are faced with when developing an e-commerce site and the author uses sound coding practices throughout the book. The major topics readers will be interested in are creating shopping carts, search functionality, content management system, and the ordering system. I especially appreciated how SEO was integrated into this book and how AJAX was used to enhance some features. Another important aspect was its coverage of the many ways to accept online payments which are presented throughout the book. When I e-mailed Cristian a question regarding this book he replied promptly.

Here's what I disliked about this book. This book is not a beginning PHP book and it's not a beginning MySQL book like the title might suggest. It is a beginning e-commerce book and readers are expected to be familiar with both PHP and MySQL. It is also assumed that you are familiar with OOP and the smarty templating engine. For people not familiar with smarty this might be a little intimidating. Smarty is actually fairly straight forward but you might need to visit www.smarty.net for a crash course. Help is given to set up your working environment and the authors do get you started down the right path with smarty.

I certainly did not like the writing style of this book. Most chapters start out with objectives quickly followed by numerous pages of code. This section of code is followed by a paragraph, entitled what just happened, which loosely describes what the code does but not how the code works. This same process is repeated until the end of the chapter. All of the code is commented well but it's up to you the reader to understand what's going on. I would have preferred if a little more time was spent describing the concepts being used. I get the feeling the authors were trying to cram this book into 700 pages out of fear of having a 1000 plus page book. Personally I wouldn't have minded if it were that long. On the flip side this did force me to really focus and understand what I was reading and not just "follow along".

Lastly, I did not like that this book did not also cover macs. There are only a handful of changes that need to be made to make this work on a mac however if you are not familiar with developing PHP sites on a mac you could easily get hung up on one of these simple problems.

Considering my dislikes you might be surprised that I didn't rate this book lower, but a walked away having learned so much I had to give this book at least four stars. This book is challenging but well worth every page.

As for critics that claimed this book is "impossible" or that "the code doesn't work" or that "the author won't respond" don't believe it. This book is challenging but as long as you stay focused and follow the book closely there should be no problems and yes the author did respond to my questions.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very good book for ecommerce, but definitely not a beginner's book, August 18, 2008

By 

Rangel A. Spasov - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition (Paperback)

The book offers great insight for building the basis of a professional, scalable ecommerce system. The code is well explained, but only if you already have decent knowledge of PHP. My only complaint is the book's structure. For example, usually a chapter begins by fully creating all the database stored procedures and the data tier, then goes to the business tier, and finally explains the presentation stuff (the book uses the Smarty template engine). In my opinion it would be better if it was organized by functionality rather that application layers. It makes the book less logical and requires a little bit of getting used to.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars VERY BAD: presentation, source code, structure, February 14, 2011

By 

j - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition (Paperback)

I don't like this book:
1. this probably is the worse source code structure I have ever seen; lower layer calling into code in higher layers. for example, program in libs calling into presentation layers which sits at upper layer of the source code.
2. there is no layers of source code, the logic and source code are spreaded every where and jump a lot. VERY DIFFICULT TO FOLLOW THOUGHTS. The call stack in chapter foru have 11 levels, to just display the category list. My goodness. This book is based on a very messy and unstructured source code.
3. the english description is very wording
4. the source code uses smarty, bringing another level of complexity; should just just mvc
5. hate the organization of the book; source code are listed in fragments, and explanation are separated in every where and repeating. I wish they could do source code toghether in a few pages, and the description also together in its own pages.
6. I do not recommend buying this book.