Codin for the Web Book Review

A Designers Guide to Developing Dynamic Web Sites

Codin’ for the Web is the 2nd book by Charles Wyke-Smith, whose first book Stylin for the Web was a great book about how to create web sites using CSS, and a book I still use often for reference.

Codin’ for the Web covers how to create dynamic web pages using PHP and MySQL. The book starts by teaching you the basics of PHP coding including such areas as if then else statements, loops, arrays etc. The book then goes into how to create basic forms and how to make forms interact with databases and how to create dynamic web pages with data from databases.

Codin’ for the Web discusses how to create a simple content management system using MySQL and PHP which allows you to create, edit and delete data. Codin’ for the Web also discusses using cookies and how to use sessions and create an authenticated system whereby users have to enter passwords to access certain web pages.

The final sections of the book covers the best way to use PHP include files when designing and building a system, as well as how to create dynamic navigation pages and how to add dynamic page titles to your web pages.

Codin’ for the web is a great book for beginners who want to learn the basics of using PHP and MySQL to create dynamic pages. The book is well laid out and is easy to follow.

Even as a person who has been programming PHP and MySQL for a number of years I found a couple of good tips in Codin’ for the Web, such as how to create a config file which can inlcude a lot of fixed variables and then the variables can be re-used and any settings that need changing can be easily changed in one file instead of in many files.

Get this book if you need to learn how to program PHP and MySQL and want an easy introduction to it.