Customer Reviews

Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am a Kona coffee farmer and I sell my coffee through my website. I used to be a professional programmer before becoming a Kona coffee farmer. Leveraging off that experience, and Larry's previous books, I wrote all the code for my website: HTML, CSS, PHP, mySQL, everything. Throughout the process I wished for a book exactly like this one.

When I heard that this book was being published my first thought was "too late to help me." When I received my copy, I realized that I was wrong. Even though I spent years as a professional network programmer, and my website was already written, I am still in the process of rewriting large parts of my website because of the excellent information in this book.

If you're a web developer, this book is for you. Even if you aren't going to write everything yourself, this book will still help you understand the important concepts such as security, PCI, user accounts and site administration.

The book does assume a certain amount of experience with PHP and mySQL. That's the best part though, unlike any other author I've ever read, Larry Ullman has a website with useful forums and he answers nearly every question himself. Have a question about figure 7.2? With this book you can get an answer.

I have been pleased with Larry Ullman's books up to this point, but this one takes the cake! I have spent countless hours researching online for the information documented in this book. This book outlines in detail two different e-commerce models that will make any developer more valuable. First example is a site that uses PayPal. It goes into detail on how to use the PayPal sandbox to test your site before it goes live. The second example shows the reader how to implement a payment gateway directly onto your site. The second example is far more complex, but knowing how to accept credit card payments directly onto your site is very valuable and is well worth a little pain in grasping all that goes into that.

He talks a lot about internet security, SSL, and server configuration ... all which are extremely important when it comes to e-commerce. If you are just starting to learn php or mysql, I would highly recommend one of his other books such as "Beginning PHP" or "PHP & MySQL" .. that is where I started 6 years ago.

Larry has taught me a lot and has helped me become a more valuable developer.
Thanks Larry

P.S. Hey Larry ... idea for next book: M-commerce (mobile e-commerce) using PHP/MySQL

I have recently completed reading this book in its entirety and I must say: reading Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and mysql wasn't effortless for me. It took me a whole month to study the book. But after this month I walked away having learned so much that I cannot do otherwise than give this book 5 stars.
Here are some important things I've learned from this book:
- how to write highly readable code and prevent common vulnerabilities
- how to incorporate different payment gateways
- how to use and build mysql stored procedures
- how to use the .htaccess file to make a directory entirely unavailable
- how to improve the search engine rankings of a site creating the so-called "pretty" URLs
- how to write and use php prepared statements that use fewer resources and thus run faster.(If you ever asked yourself how to make multiple inserts or multiple updates using a single query... this is the way.)
Thank you Larry Ullman

Anything written by this author is going to be top notch. I'm just over half way through with this book and I'm learning a ton. What I like about this Effortless E-commerce is not just that's it's been recently published, but it walks you through the production of 2 large scale, professionally developed e-commerce applications. Other books offer just random scripts and pieces of code for use on individual projects. This book puts everything together into a cohesive project so that you can see how everything works together.

This is the third PHP book written by Larry Ullman that I've read in the last 6 months, PHP 6 and Mysql 5 for Dynamic Websites:Visual Quickstart and PHP 5 Advanced: Visual Quickpro being the other two.

As with the other two titles, the thing I like most about Effortless E-commerce is the online support. On Larry Ullman's website is a support forum where you can post questions or problems with the exercises in any one of his books. Within hours Larry himself will have the answers needed to get you unstuck, so that you don't spend hours blindly troubleshooting problems and getting distracted from the remainder of the book.

A must read for any beginner to intermediate programmer serious about learning PHP.

This book takes you through the process of building an ecommerce website using PHP and MYSQL. The code works great, I encountered no problems and was excited about the whole experience of writing the code and see it come to work.

Larry has written a book that is the best one out there for understanding how to build an ecommerce site. It is well written, easy to understand and covers topics I hadn't even thought of. I'm a web designer and buy all of his books. If it wasn't for Larry and his books I would have never made it through school. What a great writer!

Tired of reading LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) books that go into building a shopping cart or Content Management System, but mention nothing about how to make money from them (accept direct payment and all the other things that come along with that, security, payment industry standards)?

This book is exactly what I've been looking for when it comes to getting into the nitty-gritty details of accepting money from other customers directly (not using PayPal website, although it is covered in the book too). The other book that I used and that is also excellent, but doesn't go into the level of detail is Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce from Novice to Professional (I've used both editions).

HIGHLY RECOMMEND this book to anyone trying to do the following: Take online payments directly using a LAMP web application.

Typically, tech books fit into one of two categories: (a) thorough, packed with examples, but bereft in clarity department or (b) simply written and easy to understand, but of little practical use. Larry Ullman's books fit in a third category that takes the best of the two, and, as a result, represents a body of work that stands apart. That said, the material inside Effortless E-Commerce follows suit and provides developers with a great introduction to building a PHP/MySQL e-commerce solution.

Many reviewers tend to highlight the specific functionality presented in a volume, and while Effortless E-Commerce has all of the relevant functionality needed to build a working e-commerce site that accepts payments, manages orders, products and customers, what is best about this book is the modular fashion in which it is written. There is no perfect solution to any application development project; chances are no tech book will contain all the answers to the myriad requirements of a given project. Yet the way Effortless E-Commerce is structured, a developer with a little intuition can pick and choose from the functional pieces presented, and build out a site to suit his or her needs. Even better, many of these pieces of functionality are independent of e-commerce. For example, the registration and login system presented can be re-used across many different types of applications, while the Paypal or AuthNet integration examples can be used to make a simple payment page outside of a traditional shopping cart application.

Overall, Effortless E-Commerce is a book every PHP developer should own. Highly recommended.

Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL provides a comprehensive guide to creating an e-commerce Web site using PHP and MySQL, and blends business concepts and customer needs with computer savvy for maximum effort. From blending different payment gateways to creating a safe server environment and incorporating routines that maximize customer sales, this will appeal to business and computer collections alike!

Effortless E-Commerce touches on a subject that many PHP and MYSQL books touch on but never really walk you through making a website.

Larry does that with this book. However, he goes short of making it a complete full featured site. Rather, he gives you a basic dynamic e-commerce site that you can add more advanced features on your own. This is where I think the book was lacking. He doesn't touch on subjects such as product reviews or recommendations etc. I don't know why he didn't since the book is only about 350 pages.

He does a good job of explaining what he is doing when he does add certain features. I like his simple basic approach to coding compared to other over complicated coding methods.

I give it a 4/5 because it doesn't cover the entire spectrum of possibilities-- which I was hoping he would and allow you to plug in those functionality if you so pleased. Granted they are not that hard to add to your page, still wish he would have covered everything about e-commerce.