How To Do Everything with PHP & MySQL Book Review

How to do everything with PHP & MySQL

Build MySQL database-drvien web applications with PHP

Written by Vikram Vaswani

How to do everything with PHP & MySQL
By Vikram Vaswani published by McGraw Hill Osborne

I started my career using Oracle databases and have been for nearly 10 years, I started with Oracle 6 and now at the time of writing we are on 10g. But it was a real eye opener when I got to teach myself to use MySQL and PHP which was supplied by my web host. I now use PHP and MySQL both at work and on my own websites, so it is really good to see another book covering the subject hit the market.

I cannot sing the praises of the open source MySQL and PHP strongly enough, there does not seem to be anything you cannot program using these two magical programs.

The book itself is targeted at novice web developers interested in programming their first applications using PHP and MySQL. “How to do everything” starts with an overview of the two technologies and then moves on to show you how to set up and install Apache, MySQL and PHP with references to both Windows and Unix setups. Although I am sure alot of you will just probably be connecting to your web host who has already installed everything for you.

The next few chapters take you through the basics of PHP including string and numeric functions as well as arrays, cookies, files, sessions, conditional statements and writing functions.

Three sample applications to work through are included in the book, these include a session based Shopping Cart, Order Tracking System and a News Publishing System for such things as press releases. All three sample applications seem highly topical and the sort of applications that you would want to build on the internet with PHP and MySQL. All applications are well documented with enough screen shots to keep you happy whilst programming.

Overall this is a great book for someone who knows little about MySQL and PHP and wants to quickly get on with producing some database driven dynamic web pages. This book is also worth looking at if you are considering producing your own shopping cart, order tracking system or news publishing system as a lot of the work may already have been done in this book for you.

Sample code from How to do everything with PHP & MySQL is available to download from the internet.

The author Vikram Vaswani’s previous book was MySQL: The Complete Reference.