Amazon.co.uk Review
Authors Luke Welling and Laura Thomson's technique aims to get readers going on their own projects as soon as possible. They present easily digestible sections on specific technical processes--"Accessing Array Contents" and "Using Encryption with PHP" are two examples. Each section centres on a sample program that strips the task at hand down to its essentials, enabling the reader to fit the process into his or her own solutions as required. Tables that list options and other nuggets of reference material appear as well, but the many examples and the authors' commentary on them take centre stage.
For reference material on MySQL, have a look at Paul DuBois's MySQL. On the PHP side, Web Application Development with PHP4 is excellent. --David Wall
Topics covered:
- The MySQL Database Server (for both Unix and Windows)
- Accessing MySQL Databases Through PHP Scripting (the letters don't really stand for anything)
- Database Creation and Modification
- PHP Tricks in Order of Increasing Complexity--everything from basic SQL queries to secure transactions for commerce
- Authentication
- Network Connectivity
- Session Management
- Content Customisation
Product Description
PHP & MySQL Web Development teaches the reader to develop dynamic, secure e-commerce Web sites and Web applications. The book shows how to integrate and implement these technologies by following real-world examples and working sample projects. It also covers the related technologies needed to build a commercial Web site such as SSL, shopping carts, and payment systems. The CD includes a Linux distribution, MySQL, PHP4 and utilities for the projects and code listings.
From the Author
When we set about writing this book, we aimed to write a book that we would like. We set out to write a book containing lots of realistic examples.
Most of the PHP books we purchased had some excellent chapters, but then devoted half of their length to a function reference. This book is nearly 900 pages long, and by not including another function reference, there was room for plenty of examples.
The book is divided into five parts. The first goes through basic language and programming concepts fairly quickly. We look at files, strings, arrays, regular expressions, code reuse and Object Oriented programming.
Part two deals with MySQL, we start with concepts, cover common queries and move on to advanced topics such as security and optimisation.
Part three deals with e-commerce and security. We look at threats, common ways of mitigating risk and how to implement security features using PHP. Topics include using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and authentication.
Part four is called Advanced PHP Techniques. It contains information on interacting with other parts of the server, or the network, dealing with date and time in various formats, generating images on the fly and using session control.
We think that the book's greatest selling point are the project chapters in part five. Each of these covers one realistic application in detail, with complete source code and discussion of why it was written that way, what compromises where made, and suggestions on ways to modify or extend the applications. The projects are: a bookmark system to demonstrate automatically personalising a site to your user's interests, a shopping cart, a content management system, a web based email service, a mailing list manager, a discussion forum, and a PDF document generation system.
Bill Camarda, a reviewer at a rival book store, described PHP and MySQL Web Development, as "Practical, effective, and cool."
We hope you get as much out of this book as we put into it.
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Luke Welling and Laura Thomson are co-founders of Tangled Web Design, and recently won the CCH Emerging Technology award for a site they built using PHP. Both are teachers at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia, and have five years web design experience.
