Book Review: Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL

By Hugh E. Williams, David Lane
March 2002
0-596-00041-3, Order Number: 0413
582 pages, $44.95 US $69.95 CA £31.95 UK
Hyperlink [ora.com]

Reviewer: Dave Whitinger

Web application developers understand that in order to succeed in today's market, you need to keep up with the latest technologies. One of the more exciting technologies to come around in recent years is the powerful platform, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP).

The most recent Netcraft survey indicates that over 9 million domains are using PHP, and the number is continuing to grow at an dizzying rate. If you are a web developer who has not yet learned PHP, you're about to get left behind.

O'Reilly understands this, and has responded by bringing Mr. Williams and Mr. Lane together to author a fairly complete guide to writing web applications on this platform.

For the purposes of applying what you are learning in a real-world example, the book is authored around the idea of creating a eCommerce-enabled and database-backed wine store.

The book begins by teaching some fundamentals of databases and the web. They describe how a database-enabled website might be architected, and then they set the stage for their fictitious company, Winestore.

Following the introductions, the book dives right in with 2 comprehensive chapters, in which they explain enough about PHP and MySQL to get you well on your way. The reader with absolutely no previous experience in PHP and/or SQL will finish these chapters with a solid understanding of the same. These two chapters alone would be enough to make the book worth reading, and build the foundation on which the rest of the book is written.

Following that they jump straight into applying the technologies to create their fictitious store, covering most every case you'll need to know, including designing and creating tables, querying, inserting, updating, and deleting data, session management, user authentication, security, searching, and enabling the site for eCommerce.

As an intermediate to advanced PHP/MySQL developer, this book introduced me to some new concepts that I had never considered before. I see this book to be most valuable, however, to the developer who is just beginning his path toward this excellent technology. A+.

---

(Log in to post comments)