MySQL/PHP Database Applications [Illustrated] (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

How could the combination of PHP and MySQL--which is feature-rich, highly reliable combination, capable of dealing with large traffic volumes, and absolutely free of charge in most cases--be any better? In MySQL/PHP Database Applications, Jay Greenspan and Brad Bulger explain how to work with the capable pair, primarily for applications you might use on a Web site. If you take the time to study the advice and work through your own tests of the concepts presented, it's pretty much certain that you'll walk away with the knowledge you need to do serious development work with the PHP scripting language and the MySQL database server.

Rather than make up trivial programs just to illustrate aspects of the MySQL/PHP environment, this book features code snippets, each half a page or so in length, that illustrate the behavior of key code structures. For example, in explaining conditional statements in PHP, the book gives you a no-frills IF statement with real values in place. It's not always obvious how the code structures will behave in practice, but the book does a consistently good job of commenting intelligently on the place of each aspect of the language in a well-designed application. The latter half of the book attacks specific problems--a chat system, a guest book, and so on--and walks through the setup of MySQL and each important PHP function for each. --David Wall

Topics covered: The PHP server-side scripting language and the MySQL database server, explained for people who have neither a lot of database administration background nor programming experience. Matters of creating and querying databases, and of performing simple and advanced operations with PHP scripting, are covered adroitly.

Product Description

More businesses and ambitious individuals are trying to bring applications to the Web but they are bewildered with the array of components and concepts needed to create a data-driven site. The cost, stability and ease of development using the Open Source PHP 4 scripting language and a MySQL database makes this combination the best choice for small and mid-size Web-based applications. PHP4/MySQL Database Applications demonstrates web-application development by presenting seven real, ready-to-use examples starting with a simple guess book and ending with a fully-functional e-commerce site with a shopping cart. Inexperienced users will learn the essentials of working with PHP4 and MySQL so they can start building and customizing database applications for the web right away!

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Product Details

• Paperback: 648 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (January 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764535374
• ISBN-13: 978-0764535376
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #427,123 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Quality Content, Sloppy Editing, March 3, 2001

By	Steve Johnson (Grand Rapids, MI USA) - See all my reviews

While the examples are great and the topic coverage is excellent, there are 2 or more typos on almost every page. It looks like they were in such a hurry to get the thing out the door that quality control was not a consideration.

The typos aren't just in the text; they are quite common in the examples. For instance, when showing an example of a "contact" table, the text refers to contacts while the example shows contracts. There are missing "_"'s in the data names and PHP and SQL syntax mistakes throughout.

Given that, if you are willing to debug the text and the examples, you'll find 99% of what you will need to know to be able to create a database driven website with Apache/PHP/MySQL.

If you need the information now, buy it. If you can, I'd wait for the second edition; perhaps they can reduce the mistakes.

sj

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too Much Fluff, February 23, 2002

By	A. C. Johnson (Oakland, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I first learned PHP from Luke Welling and Laura Thomson's excellent "PHP and MySQL Web Development," and bought 'MySQL/PHP Database Applications' to provide an alternative perspective on solving problems. Unfortunately, this book doesn't offer enough content to warrant its high price.
A full 58 pages is devoted to a PHP function reference which is a bit of a joke because PHP has one of the better online function references available. Code examples are printed with very large font again taking up more space than is necessary.
Most important, though, some of these examples are a little bit suspect.
They present a Catalog application written using Object Oriented Programming (OOP). This would have been valuable except that the classes they create are so specific that they couldn't be re-used -- basically negating the value of OOP to begin with.
They do provide a couple of examples of good and bad relational database schema, but that isn't really worth the cost of this book.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great for a quick introduction to PHP and MySQL, March 22, 2001

By A Customer

Overall, I found this book to serve as an excellent introduction to development using PHP and MySQL. The authors have a refreshing, no-nonsense approach to presenting information on MySQL and PHP quickly and in an easily understandable manner. However, on the flip side, this book is definately not for the beginning programmer. It is clear that the authors assume at least some familliarity with procedural programming languages, especially when presenting their examples. In the end, I heartily recommend this book to its target audience- programmers with some experience looking to learn how to use PHP with MySQL.