Customer Reviews

How to Do Everything with PHP and MySQL

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I won't pretend to debate this authors knowledge of the php language. For all I know he could be a genious with it. However the material is presented very poorly and lazily. The author frequently gives half-baked explainations of functions or concepts in the php language and then tells me if I want to learn more to goto the php documentation manual. NEWS FLASH! If I wanted to learn from the poorly written documentation I would have been doing that already. People buy these books for the purpose of getting in depth explainations that go beyond documentation. People don't like to be told to goto a website for more information. Is this a book about php? Or a book about which of the official php documentation files I should read? The author was just too lazy to explain things.

While I agree that using online documentation is necessary, he tells you to go online and read the documentation almost every other page. Very poor explainations, and it's a pain in the butt to keep switching between the book and the browser to get a full understanding of the concepts. Don't waste your money.

The good :

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- Well structured content

- The SQL part is not bad

The Bad :

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- hardly any explanation on why to use this or that function

- very bad programming style (= spaggetti code)

- gives you the example then you'll have to figure out how it works in a lot of cases

Conclusion :

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Not very enthousiast about this book, the SQL primer is nicely written (but a little limited), the php part is D-grade level..

If looking for a good book about php and mySql turn to the book edited by Worx (see my other review)

I skimmed through this book once, and I read the reviews here. I thought this book could not have been that bad. It is a well structured book (from reading the Titles and SubTitles). Then I started reading it in details - lucky I borrowed this book from the library.

This book started off so well. It promises "best practices", yet delivers very bad coding habits and taking shortcuts. The book outlines and titles were well designed, but the details were nothing more than, "Hay, here is the syntax, this is the usage plus some simple examples..., and you can use this to design database." Nothing that I couldn't find from the online PHP manual, and probably with better examples. Functions and keywords used were never explained properly. Its like, "Kid, now that I taught you addition, multiplication, subtraction and division.... You should be able to go out and solve the 2nd law of Thermodynamics because all mathematics built upon plus and minus."

Not only that you can't do "Everything" reading this book, having read it I think I know less PHP.

This book reflect badly on the publisher as well, I'd think twice buying similar book from them.

In the Introduction, the author claims that this book "is targeted at novice web developers". And true enough, the first two chapters guide the novice how to install and configure MySQL, PHP and Apache. Obviously these chapters have been written or thoroughly edited by an English speaking person. Then, from third chapter, the geek takes over ! He writes assuming that the reader has prior knowledge of PHP and MySQL, using terminology that he does not explain. In almost all chapters, instead of elaborating the subject under discussion, he suggests that the reader should look up the recommended website.

I thoroughly recommend any book on PHP/MySQL written by any author other than Vikram Vaswani. I did not learn anything new from this book, which is "the worst" computer book I have ever read. How can any reputable House publish a book that consistently urges the reader to seek knowledge from elsewhere ?

Ok, at first I was shocked at the low scores/bad reviews for this book - as I consider it to be absolutely golden.

The problem lies here: This is (I should mention I own lots of PHP & MySQL books) the best book you could possibly purchase if you know nothing about PHP or MySQL ..... IF you are already a programmer. (If you are coming from other languages like C, C++ or even scripting languages like Perl [ugh!], Python, etc.)

What I see is total programmings newbies tackling this (nothing wrong with that - we were all newbies once) - and this book seems to be too unforgiving if you are not already familiar with alot of programming concepts.

I should mention though, if you are already familiar with PHP and MySQL, this book can only serve as a poor reference book. There are better ones (one of which I mention all the time is Meloni's Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache All in One (4th Edition). I have no idea if the 4th edition (i own the 2nd) is as good as my edition, but it most certainly would be better than this book. )

I really like this book, but I only use it for reference when I don't have one of my other books closer.

So, in conclusion, buy this book if you need to learn PHP & MySQL if you are already an experience programmer. Otherwise, it won't really be very valuable to you.

I found myself looking elsewhere for the information I needed to understand just about everything in this book. I bought this book a couple of years ago and gave up on it, then came back to it recently as I needed to learn some of the information. It is very difficult to glean a thorough understanding of the subject matter from this book. BTW, it is not well-structured. I would have moved all of the mysql content to the front, with a thorogh explanation of those commands, and maybe adding a brief html overview, then explain the php. This guy makes a lot of references to stuff he hasn't explained yet.

So far, the book has been very helpful although I would have liked to have seen more screen shots showing the results of the code. My first impression is that the book could have been better laid out, but otherwise it's a great reference book.

I was assigned this book for a class on CMS development. It was a poor choice on the professor's part because it is not accessible to the novice, unless that person is unusually curious about the abstract logic of the language itself.

The great flaw in Vaswani's concept is that the PHP is explained only in terms of its own architecture - not divided into applications or tasks. Go down the Table of Contents for the PHP section and you see no "how to's" - only variables, operators, loops, etc. And after you learn a piece of PHP (if you do) you're given next to no applications for the code you're learning.

At least the book was distributed free of charge as a PDF thru my department. It cost about what it was worth, plus a considerable toll in frustration.

Great book. It really got me started when I first had started my trek on learning PHP. It goes more in depth than other books I had read before. The only thing I would recommend is a better chapter on error coding and security. Over all I recommend this book.

Okay, I am back about a year or so later after leaving my original review (see paragraph above). This is still a great book. I have used it so much that the binding has broken and I have a hard time keeping the pages together. I have sticky notes all in it and actually use it in my office to refer to MySQL dates and other little things. Great, great book. If you really want to get your feet wet with PHP and MySQL, please don't pass this book up.

Material is poorly presented. Author assumes programming knowledge on your part. You are often left floundering, wondering what the author meant. Found a much better book at my local library but it was, as you can imagine, seriously out of date. I have made it 1/3 of the way through this book and am considering tossing it in the trash.