Customer Reviews

PHP and MySQL Web Development (3rd Edition)

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In open source usage, the book describes a powerful and popular combination of PHP and MySQL to build websites. Each program has several texts devoted solely to it. But it is in the interaction between the two that often developers need assistance on.

The book does start with chapters exclusively on explaining PHP, and other chapters on MySQL. In themselves, you might find these to be concise and useful explanations.

But the meat of the book is given in several chapters, where each chapter is devoted to making one common application. Like constructing a shopping cart. Or a Web-based email service. These are things that you have surely experienced as a user. Now you get to see how to code them in PHP and MySQL. Which explains some of the book's size. There are 10 chapters in this section. Enough to give you plenty of examples to draw ideas from.

This book will help you understand everything you want to understand about PHP and MySQL, period.

This is the second book I've read by Luke Welling and Laura Thompson, and I have to say that they produce incredibly well-organized and well-conceived books that teach whatever subjects they tackle remarkably well.

I have read many other PHP books on the market, and this book is covers the topic, both in breadth and depth, far greater than any other book I've read.

You may have heard that MySQL and PHP come with significant security considerations. Try to find a plain-english explanation of these security considerations in any other popular PHP book out there, and you'll be disappointed. After reading this book, you will be able to make informed security decisions that don't simply parrot the prescriptive security measures described in other texts.

Beyond simply recommending this book, I recommend the authors. If you're considering *any* topic that this writing duo has addressed, I recommend them, hands down. Their writing style is clear, the examples are methodical and concise, and their explanations are extremely informative!

There is a bunch of books related to PHP and/or Mysql.
I bought 4, one about Mysql only, one for PHP only and 2 about Mysql+PHP.
Surprisingly, this one is the best - even better than the dedicated ones.

The author starts by introducing PHP, follows Mysql, then elaborates on making projects with examples, guide to build Php+Mysql projects and use of advanced features.

Just start from page one and follow the explanations, examples and advices - you are a php+mysql programmer in no time.

With the newest versions of PHP and MySQL, anyone thinking of building a database driven web site would have to think long and hard about building it using anything but PHP and MySQL. There are just three reasons for this: First the software is damn good. It's solid, fast, reliable and feature rich. Second, the software is basically free. Yes, you can buy support packages for it, but even if you do you are paying a lot less than for commercial packages. Third, the level of documentation that you can get for the software is as good as anything you can get for the commercial packages.

This book is a good example of the latter. It is a specialized book oriented to building a database oriented web site using these two packages. It accomplishes this task exceedingly well. Limited to about a thousand pages, it's enough to get you through the first year or so of building your web site.

I cracked open this book knowing only basic HTML. About halfway through it, I was a website developer. By the end of the book, I was a website professional with highly sought after skills.

This book is not only written well, but is written in a manner that kept my short-spanned attention all the way through with plenty of momentum. Possibly the only computer book I have ever read all the way through.

I bought this book after reading all the rave reviews. At the time I was a beginner PHP programmer with very little programming experience. When I got my hands on this book I was very excited, until I got past the crash course.

For a beginner, this book has too many pages without examples. It just goes too deep. For me, I need a page of description and then an exercise to see how things work. There are sections of this book which go on forever without examples, and the writers say you can do things this way, or that way etc etc. This is just confusing and too dry to hold my attention.

I have quite a few PHP books, 90% of which I have regretted buying. Online tutorials are much better of you want to learn from scratch, you'll pick up more techniques and develop a lot faster by doing these tutorials, most of which are free. One book that does stand out as being an excellent PHP book is 'PHP Solutions' by David Powers. From start to finish this is just a great book. Clear, concise and just a few paragraphs of text before you start exercises. In the space of a couple of weeks I really felt like I had improved, and it reinforced much of what I had learnt from doing online tutorials. 'PHP Solutions' is the best out there for PHP Development... Welling & Thompsons book falls way short in my opinion.

I'll just say what I like about this book. It is easy to understand how things work from following examples. Some authors know the information but their writing style is horrible, that is not the case here. The book is broken down into sections/chapters in a logical way. It is concise but at the same time explain things sufficiently.

As I was reading this book further, I found a very serious contradiction that I thought I should share with the readers:
Page 144: "PHP does not support function overloading..."
Page 161: "PHP5 now supports function overloading..."

P144 should either say that prior to v5 it didn't support function overloading or just not mention it at all. People tend to make notes or just memorize things as they read and sometimes skip pages. This book claims to cover PHP5 so errors like these should never make it into final print.

I've checked out many PHP books. Unfortunately most of them has a slow pace geared toward the beginner programmer. I have experience in C programming. I don't have time to do another "Hello World". The crash course in PHP from this book is great. It tells me everything I need to know about the syntax usage of PHP. It even shows numerous tables depicting syntax examples as a great way to look up references. The PHP crash course section gets to the point. No fluff, no cheasy long paragraphs to explain what is declaration or initialization. It is definitely a book for people with programming experience.

This book will save me a lot of time understanding PHP. I've only read a few chapters but it has already gotten me much farther then some other books I've tried.

I bought the first edition of this book several years ago and it has been my bible ever since. It makes everything amazingly easy to learn. I didn't even have to sit down and do a read-through. I just skimmed it to start out, sat down in front of the 'puter, and flipped through the book to figure out how to code each part of my first PHP-MySQL site. It was almost too easy. I have created about a dozen database driven sites since, and I always pull the book out for a quick refresher before I start coding. I wish there were books this great for learning all web technologies.

The book provides a fairly comprehensive coverage of the topics. I am particularly impressed with its coverage of programming syntax and semantics before delving into rigorous applications. The inclusion of the source code for all the examples on the accompanying CD will aid the reader in developing profiency in a short time.

The book is ideal for users of the Windows Operating System. It would be more complete if it would also address the interests of readers proficient in the LINUX (UNIX) operating system.