Some code examples are direI'm a programmer who has coded using both procedural and object oriented languages before, and I found many of the code examples concerned with the "Movie site" sections of the book to be absolutely laughable; This was not because they were geared towards beginners, but because they were so badly written as to be almost impossible to follow. There were double-nested if statements within switch blocks cut up between multiple sections of php and html completely unnecessarily. It massively overcomplicated the examples. This wasn't poor code in order to help beginners, is was simply poor code!
It is a shame, because other sections of the book contain very clear examples and good explanations to go with them. It is chapters 5, 6, 8 & 9 where the book really goes downhill.
Not good for newbiesHi, I bought this book a few months back, I have tried following the first example on a movie review site but the coding is awful in the example and doesn't work. There is supposed to be a errata section on their site which I read through and it does not fix this problem nor is it mentioned. The book is very hard to read and understand, I know html and it is still poorly written and laid out. Don't buy this book!
Not clearly writtenThis book does cover a wide range of material. But I found it rather hard to get into as many explanations were not very clear.
Some of the examples particularly in the forms chapter were significantly lengthened buy, in my opinion unnecessary scripting to set the font face, colour and background colour of the resulting form. This did not add value to the topic being covered.
Although the cover states "Some basic HTML knowledge is helpful but not essential.", good understanding of HTML is essential to understand the majority of the code contained in this book, as very little of the HTML content is explained. Anyone without knowledge of HTML will find this book totally incomprehensible.
DissapointmentI had really high hopes for this book, but I found that it mainly consisted for longwinded code dumps, which you can just as well download for free on their web site. The book is really annoying if you're trying to learn PHP and MySQL. The section about database design is an insult. The writers are unable to make what little text there remains exciting to read - it's just boring. Save your money for something else!
Excellent way in to (nearly) the latest AMP development pathTo cover the ground this book does in such a relatively short volume there were always going to be limitations. Assumptions are made about backgrounds, this is not a book for complete 'newbies' to the web. A HTML / XHTML / XML primer would be highly beneficial, as well as a rough understanding of what a database is.
However the book walks the reader through evolving code examples brilliantly, development by increments rather than leaps is the methodology. The learning curve is steep but in order to cover the scope it has to be. The samples given get you going very quickly, producing real results from Chapter 2 (introduction to PHP) onwards.
The book uses MySQL 4.0 as its base install, 4.1 installation is a little problematic if the steps in the book are followed to the letter. The book also does all its database maintenance excercises through PHP scripts, good for practice but not very real worldy where an admin tool like PHPMyAdmin would be more likely to be used.
All in all good value for money and a good introduction that will make the reader productive without going anywhere else for information.
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