Rating:  - Excellent book for php and mysql
This book is worth the first 7 chapters alone, but also covers advanced sql commands, how to create pdf's with php, has a fantastic section on using regular expressions, and an excellent set of appendices. It's perfect for beginners and still a very good reference for those of who just need a reference book or refresher course on certain sections. My personal copy is quickly joining the ranks of beat up books that I have that are filled with post it notes and bookmarks.
Rating:  - Good, though not O'Reilly standard
This is a solid book on PHP and MySQL, but it's not organized in the standard O'Reilly style. It follows a single example, in depth, through the entire book and in the later part of the book dedicates whole chapters just to explaining the code of the example.
The first six chapters, which cover PHP, SQL (and MySQL) and PEAR are the best in the book. The SQL chapter is particularly good.
Overall the book is well written and thorough. My problem is two fold. I think the organization would be better if it spent less time on the example project. And on a technical level the MySQL access is not proper or secure and is vulnerable to SQL injection attacks.
I would recommend Advanced PHP Programming from Addison Wesley for experienced PHP users. For beginners this book is a good start, but you should not use it for example code for database access.
Rating: - Kickstart your PHP & MySQL website development
Coming from a VB, ASP and SQL Server background, I found this book to be very well laid out, extremely informative and easy to ramp up on PHP and MySQL.
I've 'inherited' a live ecommerce website which was written in php and mysql. My 'client' has been complaining about how terrible the performance is, how its not responsive, etc... Now using this book as my 'guide' I can clearly see that the site wasn't put together very well.
I've been asked to rewrite the site, and so as I'm developing website version 2 the existing site will run in maintenance mode, but now looking at the code and referring back to the book, me thinks with a bit of refactoring of this site, my client could keep using this site for at least another year...
Anyways I thought y'all might be interested to hear a different (though maybe off-topic) review.
Overall this book is helping me get my job done, I'm learning alot about PHP and MySQL (its a shame that MySQL doesn't have stored procedures... yet)
Rating: - Great stuff to copy into your applicaiton!
Wouldn't it be great if you could get the source code for only $50 of a complete online store? You could start with a working system and modify it as you like, provided of course that it is well documented. In "Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL" you have excellent documentation of a well-designed application with lots of extras like introductory tutorials, the reationales for design decisions and alternate implementations of many subsystems. The application is a fictional online wine store, with credit card payment, a shopping cart, merchandise browsing and searching, and automatic selection of the lowest prices in inventory. Security features include user authentication, password management, and hacker protection. Documentation this good is worth more than the source code, which by the way is fully printed out in the book and can be downloaded for free. This book has saved me lots of time!
Rating: - Comprehensive review and examples
Serving up dynamic content with scripting applications is all the rage now in the website development world. These scripting applications can provide customized information pages, shopping carts and content-management systems, and user-influenced web experiences. While "old-fashioned" static sites and pages still have their place, dynamic content sites are becoming more and more prevalent, primarily due to their obvious advantages, but also to their modest costs. The reason for these low costs is because the software applications are generally free, thanks to the open-source movement.
Apache is an open-source web server application widely used. The most prevalent and preferred scripting application is PHP; MySQL is the predominant database management program. These three drive the great increase in dynamic content web development. While essentially free, their installation, configuration, and use requires some technical and programming skills and knowledge, but small and medium-size database-driven web sites can be managed by those not expert in programming or database management.
While there is a lot of material available on the Internet about this software and database-driven sites, and a number of books available on these topics, none is as thorough and complete as "Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL", by Hugh E. Williams and David Lane. This volume is in its 2nd edition and is a 2004 publication of O'Reilly Media Inc. The book presents an overview of dynamic web sites using open-source software and relates the principles behind generating dynamic content with database applications. The focus is on PHP, the scripting language, and MySQL, the database management software.
As befits a couple of university-associated authors, the book reads much like a college textbook. The twenty chapters include an introduction to PHP, SQL (Structured Query Language), and my SQL, covering PHP v.5, the very latest version and MySQL 4.1. The PHP chapters describe the components of the language and its syntax, variables, conditions, loops, arrays, functions, types, and more. The SQL and mySQL chapters cover database basics, tables, queries, and functions. All this material is presented systemically and thoroughly.
The thrust of the earlier chapters is to prepare for the comprehensive web example of "Hugh and Dave's Online Wines" site. That site is constructed from the component materials covered individually in the prior chapters - how to manage customers, creating a shopping cart, dealing with orders and shipping, searching the inventory, and authentication of buyers. There is a lot to developing a medium-sized site like this, but everything one needs to know is described and explained as the book progresses.
Extra materials are included as well, including information on PEAR, which is the repository of PHP extensions - script additions which are additional functionings to PHP, or are pre-made containers of code to be used modularly with your existing code; an introduction to object-oriented programming in PHP 5; a chapter on error handling and reporting , including customized reporting; a chapter on the mixed usage of Javascript and PHP; and an important chapter on security of scripts and databases.
All this includes access to the code snips at a website maintained at O'Reilly for downloading.
For intermediate level developers, this is a worthwhile resource.
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