“This book by Welling & Thomson is the
only one which I have found to be indispensable.
The writing is clear and straightforward
but never wastes my time.The book is
extremely well laid out.The chapters are the
right length and chapter titles quickly take
you where you want to go.”
—Wright Sullivan, President,A&E
Engineering, Inc., Greer South Carolina
“There are several good introductory
books on PHP, but Welling & Thomson is an
excellent handbook for those who wish to
build up complex and reliable systems. It’s
obvious that the authors have a strong background
in the development of professional
applications and they teach not only
the language itself, but also how to use it
with good software engineering practices.”
—Javier Garcia, senior telecom engineer,
Telefonica R&D Labs, Madrid
“This book rocks! I am an experienced
programmer, so I didn’t need a lot of help
with PHP syntax; after all, it’s very close to
C/C++. I don’t know a thing about
databases, though, so when I wanted to
develop a book review engine (among
other projects) I wanted a solid reference
to using MySQL with PHP. I have
O’Reilly’s mSQL and MySQL book, and
it’s probably a better pure-SQL reference,
but this book has earned a place on my
reference shelf…Highly recommended.”
—Paul Robichaux
“The true PHP/MySQL bible, PHP
and MySQL Web Development by Luke
Welling and Laura Thomson, made me
realize that programming and databases are
now available to the commoners. Again, I
know 1/10000th of what there is to know,
and already I’m enthralled.”
—Tim Luoma,TnTLuoma.com
Lead Authors
Laura Thomson is a senior software engineer at Mozilla Corporation. She was formerly a principal at both OmniTI and Tangled Web Design, and she has worked for RMIT University and the Boston Consulting Group. She holds a Bachelor of Applied Science (Computer Science) degree and a Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Systems Engineering) degree with honors.
Luke Welling is a web architect at OmniTI and regularly speaks on open source and web development topics at conferences such as OSCON, ZendCon, MySQLUC, PHPCon, OSDC, and LinuxTag. Prior to joining OmniTI, he worked for the web analytics company Hitwise.com, at the database vendor MySQL AB, and as an independent consultant at Tangled Web Design. He has taught computer science at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, and holds a Bachelor of Applied Science (Computer Science) degree.
Contributing Authors
Julie C. Meloni is the technical director for i2i Interactive (www.i2ii.com), a multimedia company located in Los Altos, California. She has been developing web-based applications since the Web first saw the light of day and remembers the excitement surrounding the first GUI web browser. She has authored numerous books and articles on web-based programming languages and database topics, including the bestselling Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache All in One.
Adam DeFields is a consultant specializing in web application development, project management, and instructional design. He lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he runs Emanation Systems, LLC, a company he founded in 2002. He has been involved with web development projects using several different technologies, but has developed a strong preference toward PHP/MySQL-based projects.
Marc Wandschneider is a freelance software developer, author, and speaker who travels the globe working on interesting projects. In recent years, a lot of his attention has been focused on writing robust and scalable web applications, and in 2005 he wrote a book called Core Web Application Programming with PHP and MySQL. He was was previously the main developer of the SWiK open source community site.