Amazon.com Review PHP and MySQL go hand in hand; the former has been carefully adapted, through the efforts of the open-source community, to the latter. For situations that require dynamic content but don't merit the complexity and development time of Java or .NET enterprise applications, the PHP language and the MySQL database server fit the bill perfectly. That's the point Hugh Williams and David Lane make in Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL, which combines language tutorials with application design advice to yield a comprehensive picture of its subjects at a reasonable price. Williams and Lane--both Australian academics who use an online wine store in many of their examples--deserve tremendous kudos for their way of presenting recommended coding strategies. Though the code listings themselves aren't remarkably well commented, the authors do a commendable job of explaining in prose what the code is up to.
Case in point: The ever-essential task of using PHP to open a connection to a MySQL database, submit a query to that database, receive a response, and format the returned rows, if any. The book addresses this problem with a straight code listing, followed by text that explains what's happening in five numbered steps. Similar care goes to the other popular applications of the PHP/MySQL duo: session management, shopping carts, and authentication of users. --David Wall
Topics covered: How to use the PHP server-side scripting language and the MySQL database engine to underlie dynamic Web sites (those that rely on database queries) and full-on Web applications, such as those that require session management and maintenance of user rosters. Tutorials in both subjects begin with the basics and proceed through moderately complicated stuff, though there's no absolutely comprehensive reference here.
Product Description What do eBay, Amazon.com and CNN.com have in common? They're all applications that integrate large databases with the Web. The popularity (and power) of these applications stems from their accessibility and usability: thousands of users can access the same data at the same time without theneed to install any additional software on their computers.
Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL offers web developers a mixture of theoretical and practical information on creating web database applications. Using PHP, and MySQL, two open source technologies that are often combined to develop web applications, the book offers detailed information on designing relational databases and on web application architecture, both of which will be useful to readers who have never dealt with these issues before. The book also introduces Hugh and Dave's Online Wines, a complete (but fictional) online retail site that allows users to browse, search a database, add items to a shopping cart, manage their membership, and purchase wines. Using this site as an example, the book shows you how to implement searching and browsing, store user data, validate user input, manage transactions, and maintain security.
If you want to build small to medium-scale web database applications that can run on modest hardware and process more than a million hits a day from users, this book will show you how.
Errata GaloreSeptember 9, 2008 New to PHP and haven't touched SQL in quite a few years. I was looking for a good beginning PHP book, not overly simplified as I have some programming experience. I needed to see how PHP and MySQL were to interact and how to set up everything on my machine (Mac). I've used MANY O'Reilly books and they're always topnotch, but this one is so disappointing to me as I find it is riddled with errors and typos. It is one thing to see typos in text and another thing altogether to have to figure out what a mistake in a code example is supposed to say. I expected more, especially since it's a 2nd edition. If it wasn't for all the forums on the web, I never even would have gotten Apache/PHP/MySQL up and running. This book isn't useless. Just not good.
Good Book, Serious ERRORSJuly 28, 2008 This is a good book with a nice overview of the stated subjects.
However, I cannot evaluate the application presented because the appendix on installing Easy PHP on Microsoft Windows has SO MANY ERRORS that I simply cannot get this software running. In particular the PEAR installation instructions are just completely wrong.
I will try a Linux environment next, since I can debug better in that environment.
MySQl-PHP textbookFebruary 18, 2007 0 out of 10 found this review helpful
As usual in text books, there is a lot of useless information that is not necessary, but since writers are paid by the word, this is to be expected.
I wish there was a section on MySQL commands.
I really like this bookNovember 18, 2006 1 out of 5 found this review helpful
I really like this book--direct, no-nonsense, and intelligently written with a minimum of jokes.
One thing that seems strange, that I'm hoping someone can clarify:
In the section of chapter 8 dealing with transactions and concurrency, there is no mention of setting transaction isolation levels (SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL command in MySQL). Instead, concurrency is achieved solely by setting table locks.
I can sort of understand this in that the authors are using MyISAM tables. But why no mention of transaction isolation levels using INNODB tables, given that this is the more standard way of dealing with concurrency issues?
Fairly UsefulNovember 6, 2006 0 out of 4 found this review helpful
The book got me off the ground with my first client application, a rudimentary database maintenance system. Most valuable were the techniques and thorough understanding required to build a satisfactory security component.
However, it falls way short as a reference tool and could have included a more comprehensive list of mysql functions.
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