Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #305364 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 359 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780975240212
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"... Yank writes clearly and concisely to get you where you want to be." -- Internet.com.au Magazine

"... in-depth title, with specific coding examples... certainly useful if you're trying to add database functionality to your site." -- .net Magazine (UK)

"Kevin, you have an unmistakable gift for helping people to understand the complexities of programming..." -- Daniel Jajeh

"Your book is wonderful, I've learned more than using books twice or three times the size." -- Erik Hey

Together, PHP and MySQL form the most widely used open source database and scripting technologies on the Web today. As a budding Web developer, you need to learn and master PHP and MySQL. Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL is a hands-on guide to learning all the tools, principles, and techniques needed to build a fully functional database-driven Web site using PHP and MySQL.

This book covers everything from installing PHP and MySQL under Windows or Linux, to building a live Web-based content management system. It also covers more advanced topics such as the storage of binary data in MySQL, and cookies and sessions in PHP, and comes complete with a set of PHP and MySQL reference tables that include PHP and MySQL syntax, functions, column types, and more.

This book not only provides easy access to all the code samples demonstrated, but, more importantly, it leaves you with the confidence and know-how to adapt the principles and techniques to your own Web design projects. -- sitepoint.com

About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
On the Web today, content is king. Once you've mastered HTML and learned a few neat tricks in JavaScript and Dynamic HTML, you can probably build a pretty impressive-looking Web site design. But then comes the time to fill that fancy page layout with some real information. Any site that successfully attracts repeat visitors has to have fresh and constantly-updated content. In the world of traditional site building, that means HTML files -- and lots of 'em.

The problem is that, more often than not, the people who provide the content for a site are not the same people who handle its design. Oftentimes, the content provider doesn't even know HTML. How, then, is the content to get from the provider onto the Web site? Not every company can afford to staff a full-time Webmaster, and most Webmasters have better things to do than copying Word files into HTML templates anyway.

Maintenance of a content-driven site can be a real pain, too. Many sites (perhaps yours?) feel locked into a dry, outdated design because rewriting those hundreds of HTML files to reflect a new design would take forever. Server-side includes (SSI's) can help alleviate the burden a little, but you still end up with hundreds of files that need to be maintained should you wish to make a fundamental change to your site.

The solution to these headaches is database-driven site design. By achieving complete separation between your site's design and the content you want to present, you can work with each without disturbing the other. Instead of writing an HTML file for every page of your site, you only need to write a page for each kind of information you want to be able to present. Instead of endlessly pasting new content into your tired page layouts, create a simple content management system that allows the writers to post new content themselves without a lick of HTML!

Customer Reviews

Not worth the price, though worth buying?
I am an absolute beginner when it comes to php/mysql, so my review should be helpful to the majority of people considering this book. I decided to buy it after reading the positive reviews here, and while I don't wholefully regret buying it, I can certainly tell you it's not worth the $35 cost.

Very first thing you should know about this book is that it's incredibly thin and small- about the size of your printer's manual, if you have one of those. So small in fact, I wasn't sure it was the book when I first received it (thought it was a booklet that came with the book). The 230 page count doesn't do this book's minute size justice.

The book is written completely in a top-bottom, tutorial fashion. It builds on a single example for the most part, first telling you how to view and define your database, then slowly populate and manipulate the tables inside. Such a style means that it's hard to get left behind, even if you're the absolute beginner and non-geek. Bottom line, I did learn how to create a database and add to it dummy values using PHP through this book. If that's your stumbling block- the absolute first step- this book will help you overcome it. The book's top-bottom/single example style is its allure, though ultimately, its fatal flaw too.

Now to elaborate on the reasons why "Build your own database driven site (php/mysql)" isn't all that great, and not worth the $[money]:

1) From the get-go, you can obviously tell it wasn't put together in a professional setting- lots of spelling mistakes, unprofessional font (for the example codes). "Not a big deal" I told myself as I worked my way through. However, I quickly realized the book doesn't even contain an INDEX at the end! Having read the book once already, it became a nightmare to try and quickly brush up on a particular syntax without wasting tons of time flipping through pages. I end up just going to [the website] often and looking up the syntax directly. This means the book is useful only for the first read, 2nd at most. As another irritating side note, the book is so small, I can't even get it to open up without having to press my fingers between the two covers to keep it open at all times. Otherwise, it'll just fold back up.

2) The book is truly for absolute beginners, and not just in its writing style, but amount of information contained inside as well. Having just read another beginner's book on mysql, I gradually realized just how much essential (not advanced, essential) information on mysql syntax was left out of it, info that's invaluable when you're just creating your first database. Syntax like variations of the various commands that make it so much easier to insert and modify tables, how to populate data via a text file etc, were all not included. And for the info that was there, as mentioned above, since there is no index, they're hard to look up.

3) This book is priced at $35. I guess the author thought he could get away with it, since there are currently no other php/mysql books written in such a tutorial and gentle style. Perhaps, though is that justification to price it at the highest price level of similar books, and for one that's 1/3 the size and amount of info as the rest? The amount of editing done is also significantly less than most other books (lack of index, spelling mistakes etc). I feel like being in the mix of a price fix here. The moment I saw the size of the book and to the end, I couldn't help but feel cheated, even though the info contained inside is good.

Bottom line, as mentioned above, if your stumbling block at this point is the absolute first step in creating mysql databases and using php to interact with it, this book is worth getting, though not "worth it" any way you look at it.

Do I have another suggestion then? Buy a couple of other beginner books on the subject first, and if you still don't get it, come to this one (buy used if possible). You're feel a lot more comfortable with your decision then, as it was your last resort anyway.

Introduction for beginners, has technical flaws
I'd like to recommend this book because there is a lot going for it. The text is readable. The illustrations and screenshots are well done. And the book presents a nice learning curve from beginner to reasonably high level concepts. But the book has some technical flaws that other beginning PHP books do not. An example is the authors use of SQL, a primary feature of this type of book, which is implemented using string concatenation. This type of SQL is not only inefficient, it's also prone to SQL injection attacks which means that any code based on this book will have serious security issues.

There are some very good parts, however. The chapter that introduces relational databases is very well done.

I recommend O'Reilly's Learning PHP 5 as an alternative to this book.

Great place to start when diving into the topic
This book is for those who like step-by-step directions accompanied by explanations of how things work. I learned many things using this approach. This book is a stepping stone to creating dynamic Web sites.

Yank does a fine job covering a little of everything without overpowering the reader with too much. Anyone who has experimented with Perl, PHP, ASP.NET, MySQl, Access, some of them or all of them will like the book. Those who can write PHP and MySQL with little help need to find a more advanced book (don't have suggestions, but I am sure others do).

I rarely ran into problems while following the examples. I've worked with other technical books and hit a brick wall at times requiring a call for help or serious research. While working with this book, I only got stuck once and immediately figured out the problem with a little research.

Yank uses visual aids and avoids jargon when explaining the process of laying out the database tables. A reviewer commented that Yank missed important concepts regarding databases. This book is not meant to go into such details. There are other books for that.

This book is well-rounded in covering all the necessary components of building a Web site using a database. While adding data, viewing tables, and querying the database, you're learning tasks that will come in handy for future projects.

Not only do you get instructions for PHP and MySQL, but also advice on structuring code so that it's used effectively.

If you've never installed Apache, PHP, or MySQL or can't recall how to do it, the steps for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X are in the first chapter. Since the latest edition covers PHP 5, the author addresses the differences in PHP 4.3. When working on the first PHP script, there is no "Hello World!" for a change.

The early chapters provide a good overview of PHP and MySQL. By Chapter 4, the contents of the earlier chapters are integrated as the backend database connects to the Web page with PHP. The next chapters show how to use forms to manage, add, delete, edit, and search data. By midpoint, the reader has designed a database, organized it, created Web pages for the data, added administration pages, and administered the database. Yank also explains how to generate cookies and build a simple shopping cart.

The appendices include MySQL syntax, functions, column types, and PHP functions to use with MySQL. The book has an accompanying Web site that includes errata and four free sample chapters. Having edited a few tech books, I know how easy it is to miss things when you're working on different computer set ups and application versions. Check the site especially since it has the code from the book. When running into problems, compare your code to the code from the site.

One chapter has a challenge along with the solution (a couple of pages later, so you're not tempted to peek). Having a challenge like this in most chapters, I believe, would help cement the learning. Overall, it will make the purchaser happy.

The four free sample chapters give you a good idea of what the book is about and its style .