Rating:  - Good Beginning Book
I'm about half way through this and have browsed the remaining half already. This book is a good beginning book for PHP and MySQL. They cover the basics quickly, yet effectively. The numerous examples give you the opportunity to apply the knowledge and practice writing code.
For those who have complained... you can download the code from the Wrox website. However, I have found that typing in the expamples helps me to digest and remeber the lessons. I even went so far and creating new files every time rather than just modifying.
I too had typos with the code... However, they have thus far, always been on my end. The code in the book hasn't seemed flawed yet - although a few times I was convinced it was, only to finally see the missing quote mark or semicolon in MY code.
I do wish that they would have gone into a bit more description about the details of conecting from PHP to MySQL, although I can do it, I don't entirely understand some of the code.
With this book you learn good, practial information about how to use PHP in conjunction with MySQL - The Apche piece is really only relevent for getting you PHP going. They cover what the book claims.
Rating:  - Wrox (your f***ed if your) Beginning PHP5, Apache, and MySql Web Development (with this book)
This book right from the very beginning contradticts itself, it is full of different code for different things and typos.
I created several pages just as they said in the book and all worked, but had nasty looking error codes all over them.
If you are a beginner, which with a title like this books i presume so, don't even think about getting this. Its difficult to follow at the best of times.
However all the code does work, just not well.
Rating:  - Excellent book !
Good points:
- very well explained
- good structure
- plenty of tips and explanations about advantages/disadvantages
- usefull examples
- nice way of programming and well documented
Bad points:
- Found the "pure" SQL part not enough documented, if you buy the book and are not a SQL geek, buy an additional book for SQL only
- Since you are reading this review, you haven't read it yet !
Rating:  - Lot's of headache for a beginner.
The book makes you copy a lot of code every chapter and then explains some of it. The code given has typos that cause errors you have to figure out by yourself. It also has some logical mistakes that was a lot harder to solve. For me as an absolute beginner these were challenging.
The book was written by several different people and they use slightly different code. One example is to connect to the mysql server they use either $link or $connect variable. Now I understand that the name of the variable doesn't matter, but it was confusing at the first place and the book is full of confusing stuff like this one.
It also introduces you to sophisticated programming concepts early on. I felt these shouldn't be for beginners.
I learned the most by figuring out the book's mistakes though. I also liked the exercises at the end of the chapters. The book also gives you links to current websites and the PHP community. I really needed these where the book was hard to comprehend.
After all I can say I can build websites now. But if you are a total novice then be prepared for lots of annoying error messages. You will need your patience towards the book.
Rating: - Great Web development book for the beginner and intermidiate user
Hi,
I work as an ISP development staff member and from time to time write monitoring tools for our support team.
I wanted to start learning php in order to add some web interfaces to our tools.
I have found this book a very good book for the php/mysql beginner like me, great for the fact that it deals also with the installation part and even gives you all the php modules/commands you can use.
the interaction with mysql is also great from the begining and you start develop your skills using these 2 great tools.
one thing I would like to see is interaction with the system, with the exec commands for example.
beside that, this book is great.
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