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Reviews of this product:
What's PEAR got to do with it
I wholly concur with the comments of D.Lloyd "TVT". I bought this book with the intention of building a website using PHP and MySQL only. I don't want or need PEAR. Not a good book. Steer well clear if you are looking for a book on PHP and MySQL.
This book should hafe been called "Applications with PEAR and MySQL"
How annoying! Yet another book that professes to be about PHP, but is in fact about an extension of PHP which I for one don't really want to use. I don't need PEAR for my site. I am quite content with native PHP Mysql support. I want a book that explains the ins and outs of that.
This book assumes you will be using PEAR. All the DB stuff is done using PEAR. Native PHP MySQL support doesn't get a look in.
Also, this book assumes you will want to use templates. I don't I keep my php apps as lightweight as possible, so templates are not needed for me.
In my mind, a good learning book will teach you the basics you need to get the job done, and leave you in a better position to explore the extensions etc for yourself, or with the help of dedicated reading matter. Had this book set out to teach you PEAR, I am sure it would have been pretty good. But it didn't. It set out to teach PHP. And it failed.
Doesn't really lead by example
It's a good and thorough book, and as far as it goes or any other book goes on this subject I would recommend it. There are however some caveats to this. The first is that there is a huge chunk in the middle which just lists a whole bunch of functions. It is essentially a reference section in the middle of the book. They do the same for MySQL as they do for PHP. So what are we upposed to do with this? Read amd memorise the whole lot?
It would have been a lot more helpful to bash through and construct a database application (which is what this book is about actually) and explain the code and have a reference section or a pullout at the end.
I now regularly use phpfreaks.com for their tutorials as this is what they do. Take a chunk of useful code, break it down bit by bit, line by line. when properly structured this is a much better way of learning as one really digests the commands and syntax. Just reading an incredibly dry list of commands and functions or being expected to do this is pretty unreasonable. I am still looking for that book that has a complex web application project that includes nearly all of the fnctions and syntax of PHP and MySQL where the reader is led through and comes out of the other end with a thorough understanding of all that is involved.
Summary: great reference book with an example of a web application towards the end of the book.
Extremely well written!
This book is an extremely well written book. The best thing about this book is that it builds a sample web database application (wine store) throughout the book. The book is also very well organised which covers PHP fundamentals and demonstrates PHP's tight intergration with MySQL. It also has an appendix covering Modelling and Designing Relational Databases. The book also covers advanced stuff such as Sessions, Authentication and Security, etc. The book has an installation guide for PHP, MySQL and Apache. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn PHP. A must by!!!
Good concise and easy to understand
I like this book - yes it is a bit heavy in terms of pages but it also covers a few of the things that are harder to find in other books - The OOP section is a very good and worth reading. This one will be in my bag and book shelf for a while..
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