Beginning PHP5, Apache, and MySQL Web Development (Programmer to Programmer)

click here for more details, find new or used items	Elizabeth Naramore, Jason Gerner, Yann Le Scouarnec, Jeremy Stolz, Michael K. Glass Our price £20.49 (£26.99) New from £5.88 Used from £9.50 Pages: 816 (Paperback) ISBN: 0764579665 Pub: John Wiley & Sons Pub date: 2005-01-27 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 24524

Reader Reviews:

Not good for newbies (0/1 people found this helpful)

Hi, I bought this book a few months back, I have tried following the first example on a movie review site but the coding is awful in the example and doesn't work. There is supposed to be a errata section on their site which I read through and it does not fix this problem nor is it mentioned. The book is very hard to read and understand, I know html and it is still poorly written and laid out. Don't buy this book!

Not clearly written (1/1 people found this helpful)

This book does cover a wide range of material. But I found it rather hard to get into as many explanations were not very clear.
Some of the examples particularly in the forms chapter were significantly lengthened buy, in my opinion unnecessary scripting to set the font face, colour and background colour of the resulting form. This did not add value to the topic being covered.
Although the cover states "Some basic HTML knowledge is helpful but not essential.", good understanding of HTML is essential to understand the majority of the code contained in this book, as very little of the HTML content is explained. Anyone without knowledge of HTML will find this book totally incomprehensible.

Dissapointment (5/6 people found this helpful)

I had really high hopes for this book, but I found that it mainly consisted for longwinded code dumps, which you can just as well download for free on their web site. The book is really annoying if you're trying to learn PHP and MySQL. The section about database design is an insult. The writers are unable to make what little text there remains exciting to read - it's just boring. Save your money for something else!

Excellent way in to (nearly) the latest AMP development path (5/5 people found this helpful)

To cover the ground this book does in such a relatively short volume there were always going to be limitations. Assumptions are made about backgrounds, this is not a book for complete 'newbies' to the web. A HTML / XHTML / XML primer would be highly beneficial, as well as a rough understanding of what a database is.

However the book walks the reader through evolving code examples brilliantly, development by increments rather than leaps is the methodology. The learning curve is steep but in order to cover the scope it has to be. The samples given get you going very quickly, producing real results from Chapter 2 (introduction to PHP) onwards.

The book uses MySQL 4.0 as its base install, 4.1 installation is a little problematic if the steps in the book are followed to the letter. The book also does all its database maintenance excercises through PHP scripts, good for practice but not very real worldy where an admin tool like PHPMyAdmin would be more likely to be used.

All in all good value for money and a good introduction that will make the reader productive without going anywhere else for information.

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