Learning PHP and MySQL [Kindle版]

This book will take you from a basic understanding of creating static HTML to an elementary but quite nifty practical knowledge of serving up dynamic Web pages on your own.

Chapters 1-6 take you through basic orientation, the installation of Apache, PHP and MySQL, followed by an intro to PHP statements.

Chapters 7-9 introduce database concepts and step you through getting PHP to talk to MySQL.

Chapters 10-17 begin the process of creating forms and other components of Web sites and applications following all the way through to integrating some sample applications.

Each step and procedure has ample code printouts, logic diagrams and output screenshots. Review of knowledge was done well. One feature of this book you should take advantage of is the question section at the end of each chapter. I usually find these irritating and skip them because often the questions don't reinforce learning and no answers are provided. The questions in this book *are* well constructed and the answers *are* provided.

Quibbles: Be prepared for a bit of keyboarding. O'Reilly provides a site for the book but the example code is not available for download. Your first bout of keying code may end in failure because the authors forget that in the first examples (the most important ones for an absolute beginner!) they need to recall being a beginner. They ask you to write out and save "a simple HTML document." I did that. The example did not work on the server. I checked this, I checked that, I re-typed the code, I typed other examples. No luck. Then I stumbled onto changing the extension of my .html file to .php and all was well. See my point?

There are two problems with this book. First of all it's filled with typos, both in the text and in the sample codes. The typos in the text made me laugh (its vs. it's type stuff), those in the codes made me cry. There are entire lines in some codes or screen ouputs that clearly do not belong there (take a look at page 126, about a third of the way into the page there's a line that goes --> ,"Aaron Weber"); <-- . Clearly, this line serves no purpose on its own and it was accidentally cut and paste from the end of the following line. Just too many typos, within 10 pages I had lost my confidence in this book. Secondly (and more importantly), this is NOT a beginner's book. It attempts to educate the reader on PHP and MySQL, and fails at both. For instance, the book never once mentions something as basic as the difference between echo and print in PHP. Then there's the instructions on installing phpMyAdmin on page 140, specifically item 6. I know nothing about MySQL so I have no idea how to "set the hostname, etc. of my database in the config.inc.php file". Thanks for nothing. In summary, if you're a beginner, you may think you've learned PHP and MySQL upon reading this book, and in fact you'll just be confused, and if you already know them, then why on earth would you use this simplistic book? I've returned my copy for a refund. By the way, I saw that one of the positive reviews below was posted on the book's blog site. Let's see if mine makes it.

I knew I had picked up the wrong book when, in the first or second chapter, the authors said that variable types didn't matter and that they wouldn't bother covering them until late in the book. Admittedly, I can see their point, but the way the statement was written made it apparent that they were aiming this at HTML authors and other people with little to no real programming experience. If you want to pick up the PHP language and already have experience with a real programming language or two, you'd be better off picking up something else. If not, this book actually would be a good way to get started.

Update: Now that I've chewed through a little more of the book, I would no longer recommend this book to even a beginner. Uncommented, and hard to read examples that make poor use of whitespace dominate later chapters. The examples aren't the 3-4 page long beasts you find in some C or Java books, but nonetheless, this book does not demonstrate good coding practices, and should not be used by a new programmer to pick up the ropes.