Review by for Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL: Building Effective Database-Driven Web Sites
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I’m a 2nd year computing student, with limited experience of Perl and SQL. I’d never used PHP or MySQL and, with this book as my ‘bible’, I installed and configured the software and built an online voting application in a couple of weeks….and it’s given me lots of other food for thought!The book covers a very broad range of content - web protocols, database design, php essentials, sql, authentication, session management and much more. It doesn’t skimp on detail, though - There’s enough here to enable anyone with any relevant programming experience to build a web database application with PHP and MySQL. The style is very accessible - each topic is covered in tutorial style and then applied to an example application (an Online Winestore) which is developed throughout the book and the code is available to download.
I’ve got more out of this one book than any number of others combined - I’d highly recommend it.

Review by for Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL: Building Effective Database-Driven Web Sites
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A very good book, showing you how to use these two very powerful tools. Text is clear and well written, and the examples are good. It also has useful beginners references on database design, sessions, TCP/IP and HTTP. All in all, more about writing an application more than just PHP/MySQL.Criticisms? Lacks the depth of a PHP or MySQL specific book, but thats okay. Main complaint is that the examples seem just a little to specific - more general example code rather than just the wine store would be nice. Thumbs up though, guys!

Review by M. G. Austin for Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL: Building Effective Database-Driven Web Sites
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Having bought many expensive computing books over the years, I find that O’Reilly tends to deliver what I’m looking for pretty much every time. With Web Database Applications with MySQL and PHP there was no exception. I found I was able to get MySQL and PHP working on Linux pretty quickly, by using this in combination with the PHP, Apache and MySQL install notes. Following that I have been able to get started on developing real web applications within a couple of days, and the examples given in the book have been useful and clear.Although there is a brief “What is a database?” and “What is a webserver?” discussion at the start of this book, you should not expect to learn web concepts, SQL or HTML here. Having done lots of Oracle/Ingres and Java development before I hit the ground running. However, it might be too much too soon if your background until now has been building static webpages with Microsoft Frontpage. It is interesting that there is no discussion as to when PHP and MySQL might be an appropriate solution. Indeed the back cover of the book asks “What do eBay, Amazon.com and CNN.com have in common?”, answering that “they are all applications that integrate large databases with web interfaces”. Interesting choice of examples, as Oracle is almost always the database of choice for this kind of very large implementation (including those mentioned). It seems to me that the real advantage of going down the PHP / MySQL route is that the software is free and hosting is very cheap. A dedicated chapter outlining the strengths and weaknesses of the PHP / MySQL approach would have been a nice addition. All in all, I’d recommend this book as an excellent technical starting point if you want to use PHP and MySQL for your next development project. Having this book to hand will mean you don’t need to delve too heavily into the nuts and bolts of the documentation for the first few weeks!

Review by Alan Sawyer for Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL: Building Effective Database-Driven Web Sites
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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.

Review by Martin Farrimond for Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL: Building Effective Database-Driven Web Sites
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I managed to learn a lot from this book fairly quickly. From knowing absolutely nothing about PHP (and not being a programmer either!) to running the examples was a rapid progression.It is, however, not a reference manual, and there seems to be occasional stuff presented and used that’s not explained (like sessions).The examples are good, though and give one a pretty good idea of what’s going on on.Unfortunately, php has moved-on slightly since the book was published. The examples one downloads from the publisher’s website have been updated, but do therefore differ from the examples published in the book. The publisher’s website also has an errata which does contain some significant corrections.Two main criticisms:
1)The book doesn’t really touch Windows - it focuses on Linux as the base OS. I did eventually manage to get Apache, MySQL & php all installed & working on Win2K - In the end it was easy, and all 3 seem to run just fine, but it was darkness all along the way.2) Some of the stuff around authentication and sessions doesn’t work - at least *I* can’t get it to work - neither locally nor on the remote (Linux) web server & I have no idea why it doesn’t work. As I said, I’m no programmer!