Well written introduction to two vital products

This book demonstrates how well. It starts out with a quick course in PHP (OK, 160 pages is hardly quick but it seems to move along at a good pace), follows it up with a brief look at MySQL before a short digression on E-commerce leads into building authentication and secure systems with the two tools (a marvellous place to start when you're thinking about commercial-grade web systems.)

After some more advanced PHP the book then goes on to give marvellous examples of web applications, a shopping cart, content management system, email service, mailing list manager and web forums. Finally it has a good chapter on generating PDF files using PHP.

Overall the book is well written, well structured and can take someone with some programming knowledge and no experience with PHP and MySQL all the way to the development of full scale database backed web applications.

That's not to say that the book doesn't have some shortcomings. You will want to have some program design experience and preferably some experience with database design as these are given short shrift. The book also lacks examples and discussion of some of the less database intensive parts of PHP and some of the more obscure taks you may need to perform. However it does provide an excellent introduction to these two products for someone, like myself, who already has some experience. It must also be added that there are some typographical errors in some of the code examples, not too many and not too serious but in this day and age why can't authors cut and paste from running and debugged code, Kernighan and Plauger managed it more than twenty years ago in "Software Tools."

I would recommend purchasing this book and "PHP Developer's Cookbook" for the perfect PHP bookshelf. If you wish a fuller understanding of MySQL and database design then add "MySQL" by Paul DuBois and Michael Widenius.

I rate it as four stars rather than five, only because it is not perfect and so many others have given it five.

In short: A Wonderful book.

     I purchased this book after having carefully studdied many books about the subject. I fell for this book, simply because it got the best rating and when I went to my local book store and scanned it, I had to own it. It starts out with a PHP crach course (syntax and semantics), moves over to cover string manipulation, expressions, function calls etc. All in all, very simple stuff that you should be able to grasp easily, are you known to other high level programming or scripting languages. Then you get introduced to basic database design, dynamic image generation etc. What makes the book special however, is that the whole second half of the book, shows you real world examples of things like session control, user authentication, shopping cart management, a mailing list manager, an email web-interface, web-forums and more. This second part is what you really will learn from! The book should be called "Real World PHP and MySQL development." The only little thing that I miss in the book, is a reference list of all common functions for PHP. I am not complaining though, the book does not state to be a reference book!

Excellent PHP/MySQL book!

     Firstly, I'm not some programmer with a Ph.D. in Software Engineering or a guru who's been using Unix for 20 years. When I got this book I knew some C++ (learned some in IT/Computer Science classes in high-school) and a fair amount of HTML. This book was, and still is, the perfect level for me (if you don't know any real programming yet, but are an advanced computer user, you won't have any problems though).

The book is well structured and coherent. It's not something where one will just flip through and maybe learn something near here and there. It starts at the basics and then covers more and more advanced material. Everything is very well explained - I hardly ever had to re-read any sections - I nearly always understood the things after reading through the chapters. And no, I'm not genius. ;)

This book doesn't just tell you about all the basic PHP functions, MySQL basics and how to use them both together. Only about a third of the book is on that. The main part of the book deals with real-world applications - E-commerce is the focus of this book, but Part V of the book (Building Practical PHP and MySQL Projects) also covers designing/programming other projects such as a forum or a Email service (yes, you'll learn to make something like Hotmail). Don't think that you will only be able to make E-commerce sites after reading this book - I presonally don't make any E-commerce sites as of yet, yet I have learned extremely much from this book, and I am only about half-way through.

Frankly, this book rocks for PHP beginners and intermediates. This book is even sort of fun to read if you're a bit of a geek who's motivated to learn, I guess. I love this book! :)

My only complaint: Since version 4.2.x of PHP, global variables are set to 'off' by default. This basically means that one needs to code one's scripts in a slightly different way when one posts/gets variables, uses cookies or uses sessions (you will definitely use this stuff when you get into slightly more advanaced PHP applications). It is easy to code in the new way, but one will probably need a bit of outside help. This isn't the book's fault though, so it still deserves 5/5 stars, in my humble opinion. I'm sure the next edition (if a second one will be published) will clear this up.