Customer Reviews
A great introduction - By: Phil Morse, 31 Dec 2008 
As someone who has developed "shop front" websites since the late 90s, but who never needed to take it a stage further until the last 18 months, I needed a fast, accessible introduction to both PHP & MySQLin order to build a dynamic, search-driven website for my company - fast.
If you know enough HTML/CSS to knock up a brochure-style site, & can plugin a bit of Javascript, get a form to work, & put the whole thing live with a hosting company, this book will take you by the hand & get you right up to speed with the theory & practise of building your first dynamic site, including keeping it secure.
Larry Ullman employs some pretty nifty & subtle techniquesin his method of teaching, & I guarantee that you'll find yourself using this as much as a reference as anything else after you've worked through it from cover to cover as advised.
While his method of printing the codein full then going through it piece by piece may irk those who bemoan the waste of paper or feel patronised by such a steady approach, I loved it because you get the chance to type the codein & try & work out what's going on for yourself before having it explained to you. This is a great way of learning & challenges you to understand what you're typing rather than just doing it by rote.
There is no object-oriented programmingin here, no real depth to the MySQL/SQL part, & nothing about "mashups", web services etc, & you're definitely going to want to follow on with more learning on these themes (I also have PHP 5 Advanced by the same author, which covers the PHP parts of these topics), but there is an awful lot of learning to do before you can move on to such subjects, & this book packs it allin clearly & usefully.
By the way, PHP 6 is not released as I write this, but there is little difference between PHP 5 & 6 from the point of view of this book - the Unicode chapter is maybe one to skip from that point of view, but it's a small point. Otherwise, if you fallin to the category I outlined earlier, I'd thoroughly recommend this book.
A head of the game - By: Mr. Aladdin Alkindy, 26 Sep 2008 This book is a head of the game, it will teach you the fundamentals of php6 & it tells you when the code is only for php6 (and that php5 code won't work). The good thing about this book is that it teaches you how php & mysql dance together. Don't miss this book, get it while it is still new. Even if you don't know much about mysql this book has an introduction chapter to mysql. I highly recommend this book to all levels except those who are super advanced programmers.
Whoever formatted this book needs to be shot. - By: Kirk St Moritz, 15 Sep 2008 
This is the worst technical book I have ever attempted to read. Not because of its content, which may or may not be fine, but because of its formatting.
I don't know whether I have a newer edition to everybody else but my copy is formattedin two narrow columns per page, instead of the usual one column.
This makes listings look ridiculous. Lines of code which should fit on one line are instead splayed over 3 or 4 lines.
In one particularly bad example, the page layout went as follows:
Column 1: standard text. Then mid way down column 1 a listing starts. The listing continues to the end of column 1 then goes to the next page, where it goes down column 1 & column 2. You now have to go back two pages to pick up on the standard text, which continued on column 2 of the first page.
The content of this book may well be excellent, I couldn't really say, but its presentation is awful.
Excellent primer for PHP MySQL - By: A. I. Mackenzie, 03 Sep 2008 
This is an excellent starter for learning how to use PHP/ MySQL.
It goes along at a fair pace, & may be too fast if you don't have previous HTML & programming experience. The separate PHP for the World Wide Web: Visual Quickstart Guide (Visual QuickStart Guides)and MySQL: Visual Quickstart Guide (Visual QuickStart Guides)booksin this series take this a bit more slowly, so if you're struggling they might be a good place to look.
Otherwise this will quickly introduce you to the concepts & use of both products. I'm still using this when I do some PHP programming, & other members of my team are also using it. It's excellent & the code is all available for download which avoids either losing/ scratching the CD or lots of typing.
The install Appendix A is worth the money alone, as I've used it to install both PHP & MySQL on Windows servers & my Mac at home. It points to easy installs on the web for the Mac.
My only gripe is that the layout is difficult to follow & it was hard to work out what the projects were actually doing, a little more explanation here might be useful.
Otherwise excellent, recommended particularly as PHP/ MySQL are free leaving you with some spare cash to buy this!
excellent communicator - By: A. Cresswell, 29 Aug 2008 I bought this book at the same time as 2 others on similar topics. I've hardly used the other 2. This book is well-written, with useful examples & the author has explained the sample code line-by-line... a real help when trying to amend one of his examples to produce something for your own purposes. As a teacher with some experience of HTML/ VB / ASP.NET I found this book really easy to follow.
There are a few very minor typosin the text (not surprising, given the number of pages), but if you visit the author's website there's a full list of corrections. It took me about 5 mins to go through & correct them, so it didn't really reduce the effectiveness of the book.
One feature I've really found useful... there are occasional little tables of other functions that do similar things. There isn't spacein the book to describe them allin detail, but knowing the name of a fucntion makes it really easy to find out more using your favourite search engine.
Strongly recommended.
I also boughtHow to Do Everything with PHP & MySQL (How to Do Everything) (which is absolutely useless) & Mysql Crash Course (Sams Teach Yourself) (which is just about OK as a reference, but has awful page layout that makes it really hard to read). This book was far better than either of those.
