Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I can't really criticize a lot on this book. I am only on chapter 3 starting 4 today. This book requires some sort of programming knowledge, which suited me. So if you haven't developed any websites I wouldn't suggest it.

Mr. Darie makes you use smarty templates and yahoo table builder, which kind of upset me because I was hoping to see everything made from scratch without 3rd party engines and such.

Bottom line. This book needs a lot of dedication and time. It does teach you a lot of stuff, assuming you know the basics of programming.

Highly recommend for experienced programmers.

I can't speak highly enough of this book, but be sure you are buying it for the rights reasons. Here's why:

I have good knowledge of HTML and CSS, but I know very little about PHP, SQL, and MySQL. I want to start an online store, and HTML and CSS just won't cut it. I knew from the beginning I would need to learn PHP, and likely JavaScript to create a functioning store.

HOWEVER: This book does not teach you PHP. It does not teach you JavaScript, or SQL, MySQL, AJAX, or any programming language at all. Are we clear on that? Good.

Now that that is settled, let's see why this book really shines!

This book is about e-commerce. It is a tutorial, and it leads you step-by-step through creating an online store that is fully-functional, secure, and flexible. If you do all the steps, you end up with a complete store. Oh, wait, did I say IF you do all the steps? Actually, no. You can cut and paste the code as you go, if you want, although you would learn less that way. Either way, you need to be thorough. Programming is not for the sloppy, impatient, or anyone with the "that's close enough" mentality. You must follow the instructions meticulously, and you will have to track down every typo. There will be some troubleshooting involved, but I figured it out, and I don't know PHP, like I said earlier.

So, if the code is available for download at the author's website . . . why get the book at all? Well, because if you want to learn how it all works together, how to customize it without breaking it, how to improve or adapt it, and why it is set up the way it is--then you need to read the book. It is easy enough to read and understand, even without much knowledge of PHP.

I found this book to be perfect, because it is exactly what I needed: a tutorial for creating a fully-functional, secure, and flexible store.

So is this book for raw beginners? No. You should have enough experience with webpages to comprehend HTML and CSS, minimally. Experience with programming is a help, but not necessary.

So is this book for intermediate web designers? Absolutely!

How about advanced designers . . . well, I'm not qualified to answer that. But I can tell you the authors of this book have very sound logic when it comes to the architecture of an online store. I imagine it would be beneficial to all but the most experienced designers.

Bottomline?

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK FOR ANYONE DESIGNING AN ONLINE STORE.

I, too, agree that the code in Chapter 3 is filled with errors.

I'd still like to work through this book. Right now I'm giving it 1 star since I've wasted so much time trying to get the Chapter 3 code to work, but I may raise it as I get through the book.

I recognize the possible frustration in some of the reviews, however, it is not the book but my competence that caused most hiccups I experienced.
I recommend to carve out enough time to go through all the excercises and type it all yourself (no shortcuts) to come to a thorough understanding, the book covers a lot of ground. As you type, the "karate kid" effect kicks in and you start seeing the light. I did get in trouble debugging because the code covers a lot of different applications so error messages are pretty cryptic. I ended up creating a little test page that calls all the PHP libraries where you can test all the functions (with ECHO). There are probably better ways todo this... Perhaps a few pointers on debugging would have swayed some single star raters....or mabye not...
The structure of the shop is really good, the end of the day it will be easy to maintain by someone without a degree in computer science.

Be very careful with this book if you are on a windows based machine. There is a PHP bug noted on page 150. Unfortunately, no reliable fix or work around is noted anywhere. The fix noted on the errata sheet does not help the matter. Furthermore, there are many forums discussing the problem, but none of them offer a viable solution. The book could be worth four stars if this problem were actually addressed. The author new about the problem, but failed to offer a viable solution to people working on a windows based machine. All they had to do was create a different approach to making multiple queries to the database. What a disappointment.

Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition (Beginning: From Novice to Professional)

I'm an ASP.NET/C# developer, living in Microsoft world. I got tough time at very beginning to understand fully about PHP, Smarty, etc. So, I took a crash training about PHP/MySQL by reading "Beginning PHP and MySQL: From Novice to Professional". After that, things were getting much better.
The book itself is really good. I like its gradual approach from beginning to end, from front to back, about the developement of an e-commerce web site.

The only thing missing is about reporting. With decade experience of report development (although not in e-commerce field), I think reporting is an important functionality for e-commerce.

I found this book to be far more than a tutorial on ecommerce. It's attention to good programing technique has been invaluable to me as I progress from a beginning PHP programmer to a more intermediate level. Its been slow going but well worth the effort. I have used the framework for tshirtshop in other applications I've written as the code for database abstraction and error handling are really solid. His work also clearly demonstrates the value of self documenting code. Coverage of Smarty and MySQL procdures is excellent. One of the very best programming books I've ever used.