MySQL/PHP Database Applications

Rating:
Summary: Yeah, it's not for the beginner...
Review: ... and it's not for people who can't figure out which version of PHP they're running. I had no problem running the code against PHP 5. There's a /whole/ bunch to wade through, code-wise, but so far I'm liking it. There's a lot of stuff in there that I can use.

It does seem a strange to me that they'd publish a book on PHP 5 while it's still in flux, but I guess everyone's racing to be first.

Rating:
Summary: It COULD be worse...
Review: As a general overview, the content of the book is pretty good, and would have been great... but the authors and editors do a VERY poor job of being specific where necessary, verifying that the scripts offered in the text actually run, and explaining the concepts and language constructs before using them. For the beginner, this book would be confusing as all hell, due to the vague descriptions and error filled examples. For the experienced programmer looking to pick up PHP & mySQL skills, the book is pretty much an exercise in debugging and wince-management as the stream of vague descriptions of the topic at hand wash over you, or some language construct is used with no information about it anywhere close.

Rating:
Summary: good guide for web developers
Review: I bought this book knowing next to nothing about PHP or MySQL. (I did have experience with Active Server Pages so I was familiar with using scripting languages in sites.) It has served as a great reference for me in learning PHP and becoming familiar with MySQL. PHP and MySQL are often used together in building sites and providing everything from installation instructions to function references is a great help. If information exists on a function that is out of the scope of this book, the authors refer you to specific pages on the Web that will provide you with those details.

The index could use a little beefing up and there are a lot of typos, but the typos have not taken away from the usefulness of the book.

This is the only book I have bought on PHP and MySQL and I don't feel inclined to buy another-- this one is just fine.

Rating:
Summary: Some good overview, offset by typos and poor organization
Review: I found the first few chapters to be the most valuable ones, providing overviews of general topics. In particular the chapter on relational database design would be good for someone who's a new or intermediate database designer.

After the first few overview or theoretical chapters, though -- once you "dive into the code" -- things start to unravel pretty quickly. The choice of topics covered via code examples seems random and arbitrary. It's possible that perusing the code included on the CD would be of value. That might be true if the code wer not riddled with typos and errors. As for the text itself, once you get into the code sections, you can almost count on a typo or more per page. I even found errors in the entity relationship diagrams. As another reader pointed out, discovering the errors may serve as a debugging exercise, but that's not why you buy a book like this. And if you just want to peruse code, there is plenty of open source stuff out there for free.

As a web developer with some familiarity with MySQL and PHP (and extensive programming experience in other areas) I found this book to be incomplete and spotty as a guide to developing PHP/MySQL applications. You could do worse, but you could do a whole lot better.

I get the feeling that they ran out of time with this one, and rushed to finish it up. It's too bad that the second half of the book isn't as good as the first half.

Rating:
Summary: Loved it!
Review: I'm puzzled by the negative reviews. I'm a 30 year vet in computing, recently retired, and doing web/tech computing part time. I've needed to grasp parts of computing that I haven't been involved with, and boy did these guys get it right!

I loved the comment about "The bulk of this chapter is for those of you who have made it to the early 21st century without working with relational databases!" That's me! And the writing was just right in terms of code hints and kinks along with clear explainations of database concepts.

I'm reading the first edition, saw the second edition was out, and ordered it.

I will agree, however, that there are *many* editing mistakes where they mistake terms or have errors in their tables/code. Hopefully the 2nd edition solves this.

Rating:
Summary: Cover to cover, a great book to get you started
Review: This book is not well explained overall. As I It is hard to find a book convined MySQL and PHP, but I recommend to look for another book. Even I have other programming languages and databases knowledge, it is hard to follow this sloppy book.

Rating:
Summary: A very good book as "short course" in php & mysql
Review: This book is very good for "not too novice" who would like to learn PHP & MySQL simultaneously. It is a nice book. If you would like to learn PHP and MySQL fastly, then this book is for you. If you buy this book, don't forget to buy another book which covers more about basic programming in PHP (you don't get it in this book).

Rating:
Summary: Yeah, it's not for the beginner...
Review: This is a great book, two years ago. I have spent more time and energy than I wish over the last two months trying to get the syntax differences down, and hunt down bugs in the code I'm writing. A new edition is out expected out in August, in which PHP 4.2 and MySQL 4.1 are to be covered. While no published book will keep up with the advancing of technologies that are standards today, this new edition will be much much closer to what is in use right now.

Wait if you can, otherwise, you're in for a headache.

Rating:
Summary: bogus code
Review: Unfortunately for me I spent the $40 for this book. What a mistake!

When I first opened it up I was exited by the project management example in chapter 17. I told my wife I must have it! After I got home and started reading through it I decided to load the sample data into the my htdocs directory in my local Apache install. The nightmare never ended in getting the code to work. And this wasn't because I didn't set up the user accounts in MySQL! After messing around with it all weekend I decided to pay my fried a visit who is an expert web developer (builds web-enabled databases for California lobyists with millions of records). He looked at the code and found constructs that are specific to PHP5. The readme didn't say that I must install PHP5 for the examples to work. Anyway, after changing the code to conform to PHP4 syntax the examples still didn't work.

I'm totally disappointed that I spent my hard earned dollars on this book. If the authors would be kind enough to post some code that works and is easy to follow, that would be a good step at repentance. Oh, one last thing, the authors make use of PEAR; that was a pain to install too. However, I got that working (with no instructions in the book) and the code still fails to work.

Two thumbs down for this book.

Rating:
Summary: Easy to Understand but not very good over all
Review: Within the first couple of chapters, I noticed that they really need to use spell check! Typos in their own book scared me because Typos are something that is not accepted when coding. Seemed they used the good vs bad relationships and normalization for MySQL, almost same topics as used in the O'Reilly's MySQL/msql book.

It was simple to understand though. Beginners should look for other books instead of this!