Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL

Web Database Applications is tightly-focused, packing in lots of solid technical information without wasting words. It does not pretend to cover all the potential uses of PHP, and the screen shots will not win prizes for design, but it's a great handbook for building robust, secure database applications with these popular technologies. --Tim Anderson

Reader Reviews:

This book should hafe been called "Applications with PEAR and MySQL" (0/0 people found this helpful)

How annoying! Yet another book that professes to be about PHP, but is in fact about an extension of PHP which I for one don't really want to use. I don't need PEAR for my site. I am quite content with native PHP Mysql support. I want a book that explains the ins and outs of that.

This book assumes you will be using PEAR. All the DB stuff is done using PEAR. Native PHP MySQL support doesn't get a look in.

Also, this book assumes you will want to use templates. I don't I keep my php apps as lightweight as possible, so templates are not needed for me.

In my mind, a good learning book will teach you the basics you need to get the job done, and leave you in a better position to explore the extensions etc for yourself, or with the help of dedicated reading matter. Had this book set out to teach you PEAR, I am sure it would have been pretty good. But it didn't. It set out to teach PHP. And it failed.

Doesn't really lead by example (8/8 people found this helpful)

It's a good and thorough book, and as far as it goes or any other book goes on this subject I would recommend it. There are however some caveats to this. The first is that there is a huge chunk in the middle which just lists a whole bunch of functions. It is essentially a reference section in the middle of the book. They do the same for MySQL as they do for PHP. So what are we upposed to do with this? Read amd memorise the whole lot?
It would have been a lot more helpful to bash through and construct a database application (which is what this book is about actually) and explain the code and have a reference section or a pullout at the end.
I now regularly use phpfreaks.com for their tutorials as this is what they do. Take a chunk of useful code, break it down bit by bit, line by line. when properly structured this is a much better way of learning as one really digests the commands and syntax. Just reading an incredibly dry list of commands and functions or being expected to do this is pretty unreasonable. I am still looking for that book that has a complex web application project that includes nearly all of the fnctions and syntax of PHP and MySQL where the reader is led through and comes out of the other end with a thorough understanding of all that is involved.
Summary: great reference book with an example of a web application towards the end of the book.

Extremely well written! (1/1 people found this helpful)

This book is an extremely well written book. The best thing about this book is that it builds a sample web database application (wine store) throughout the book.

The book is also very well organised which covers PHP fundamentals and demonstrates PHP's tight intergration with MySQL. It also has an appendix covering Modelling and Designing Relational Databases.

The book also covers advanced stuff such as Sessions, Authentication and Security, etc.

Good concise and easy to understand (1/1 people found this helpful)

I like this book - yes it is a bit heavy in terms of pages but it also covers a few of the things that are harder to find in other books - The OOP section is a very good and worth reading. This one will be in my bag and book shelf for a while..

3.5 Stars Really (6/7 people found this helpful)

I would generally agree with much of what's been said by other reviewers, particularly the poor support for Windows -- which is a reasonable environment for playing and practising -- and one would certainly imagine a popular choice for trying things out.

Another thing that bothered me was the number of errors. O'Reilly have a good system for reporting book errata on their website -- and I used it in this case, going through all reported errors in the book, pencil in hand. However, despite the number of errors reported for this book, there are others I've discovered in only my first couple of weeks of using it.

It can be quite hard to trust a book with so many errors, and when one is learning something, it's much harder to spot errors except the hard way.

Once you do manage to get an environment set up in which you can play, it is a pretty reasonable book -- and I don't think their concentrating on their winestore example is such a bad thing.

Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL

Hugh Williams, David Lane

Editorial Review: