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Beginning PHP and MySQL 5: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition (Beginning from Novice to Professional)
Apress by W. Jason Gilmore Search W. Jason Gilmore
Product Description
Book Description
- Essentially three books in one, provides thorough introductions to the PHP language, MySQL database, and shows you how these two technologies can be effectively integrated to build powerful websites.
- Provides over 500 code examples, including real-world tasks such as providing an auto-login feature, sending HTML-formatted email, testing password guessability, and uploading files via a Web interface.
- Updated for MySQL 5, includes new chapters introducing triggers, stored procedures, and views.
Interested in becoming a master of the PHP language and MySQL database but don't know where to begin? This bestselling book ranks among the most thorough and practical guides in print, covering all of the key concepts and features, and showing you how to effectively integrate PHP and MySQL to build powerful websites.
The book begins with a vast overview of PHP's capabilities, starting with a survey of the installation and configuration process on both the Windows and Linux platforms. Next, several chapters are devoted to basic PHP concepts, including variables, datatypes, arrays, functions, string manipulation, and processing user input. Other key PHP topics are also covered, including PEAR, session handling, LDAP integration, the Smarty templating engine, Web services, and PDO.
Next up is a presentation of MySQL's key features. You're first guided through MySQL's installation and configuration process, and are presented with an introduction to its storage engines, datatypes, administration utilities, security features, and data import/export facilities. New MySQL 5-specific chapters have been added in this edition, covering triggers, stored procedures, and views. Along the way, you'll gain insight into PHP's assortment of MySQL functions (using both the mysql and mysqli extensions), and learn how to create and execute queries, perform searches, and carry out key database tasks from within your Web application.
What You Will Learn from This Book- Install and configure Apache, PHP and MySQL on both Windows and Linux
- Accept and process information submitted via HTML forms
- Authenticate users and track user preferences and data using PHP's session-handling capabilities
- Process Web-based file uploads using the HTTP_Upload PEAR package
- Create your own RSS aggregator using Magpie, and process XML files in amazingly efficient fashion using SimpleXML
- Use both command-line and graphical MySQL clients to effectively manage your data
- Secure the MySQL server, creating roles and restricting access even at very granular levels
- Effectively integrate PHP and MySQL to create dynamic, data-driven web applications
This book is for the budding web developer searching for a powerful and low-cost solution to building flexible, scalable websites.
Customer Reviews:
Bloated and wordy
I'm a sucker for a good price and I bought this book hoping that in the 1000+ pages I could start to learn PHP. I did - but I also quickly got frustrated and distracted by the author's complete refusal to explain ANYTHING with conciseness.
This is a reference book, not something you'd want to read cover to cover.
Boring examples, wordy discussions - the authors seems to have been more interested in boosting page count than anything else :(
Another bloated PHP book was Larry Ullman's Visual QuickPro. Are there any php tech authors who know how to write??
Very valuable addition to my collection 
This is a great book, it covers a ton of material in total but does not totally cover anyone particular subject. I will not list all the chapters another reviewer did that already, but I have over 30 books on php and this one was on my wishlist here on amazon for a long time.
This book does have examples and they are working examples if you manually type them and follow along. The examples however are not long and do not go in depth or build upon previous examples, each example is just long enough to demonstrate the subject. This to me is better than the online php manuals, because it makes more sense. The manual uses generic variables and naming conventions, such as foo and bar and foobar, $a, $b, $c etc, which for a new programmer is confusing. This book uses real names and puts the material into a perspective that most people can better envision. Like examples about employees.
This is more of a reference. It even says in the introduction"novices and seasoned php and MySQL developers alike have something to gain from this book, as I've intentionally organized it in a hybrid format of both tutorial and reference",
So this is not a here is a a script from beggining to end starting with the basics and building, the book would have to be two volumes, it is over 2 inches this as it is. If you are looking for a follow through step by step, info then implementation and build up, David Powers books are the ones you really want, I love those books. But you really really should consider having this book for an easy reference, this will give you a more in depth way to review information in other books, or a second explanation, this is sort of like having a tutor.
Over 2 years ago I decided with no prior experience I was going to learn how to build websites. I started with a wysiwyg editor, learned it, and found out I needed to learn a language to process forms on the server side. That lead to my discovery of php, the most confusing programming language known to man. I say that becuase it has procedural and now OOP abilities, for example java is straight and very simple to learn, pure OOP. I am working on sites where procedural and OOP php are intermingled and it gets confusing. This book has been a huge help in figuring it all out.
One thing I learned after reading many books on php and mysql and just not getting it, was I needed to learn the basic programming concepts. So I did my research and found out what my local college was using for that. The book programming logic and design, by Joyce farrel(5th edition), there are 2 and introductory and a Comprehensive, I suggest the comprehensive, that is the one I got for just a little more $$, these books are not cheap, about $80, but the information is superior. She does not teach you a programming language she demonstrates the logic and how to design programms, how to use flowcharts, and suedocode. There are entire 50 page chapters on how arrays work, methods, fucntions all the stuff the php beggining books try to show you, not to say they fail at it, but it helps to have a book on nothing but that, then learn a programming language, like php. There is also a book that goes with it to help demonstrate the concepts with code java or vb, programs to accompany programming logic and design. I bought it and do not really recommend it, you could learn alot from it, but I feel it was written with too little example code for a begginer to grasp with out deep thought and many trials and errors. Just read Joyce farrels book along with David powers books and your set, along with some other books.
By the way, while David powers does walk you through he does tell you he is going to have you do something then undo it and do it better. This may frustrate some people because it takes time, but you really can't rush learning php as I am now learning it takes lots of time and practice, repetitious practice, until it is burned into your brain, then beginning php and Mysql is a very very valuable book for quick simply explained information.
All in all I have learned PHP takes patience, java is fairly simple, and structured much like php's oop, yet php's OOP is a devil in its own with its keywords, and other very special features.
The section on smarty is short, but clear cut once you figure out how to configure / use it, it is not a full explanation. If you want that look up smarty on amazon, there is only one in depth book. I pray someone will write another book about smarty soon.
What I really liked about this book and its author Jason Gilmore, is the book has his email address in it and he does actually email people back????? That is a first for me atleas.. I had a question about something and he emailed me back in I want to say within 24hours, I have never once had a response from any author, he also has a site for the book www.beginningphpandmysql.php
I only take the time to write a review this long because these are the ones I look for when purchasing any product, and the one where the guy listed the chapters is what made me finally fork out the money for this book, there are still many more on my wishlist here and I am very happy with my decision to purchase this book sooner than others. Furthermore I have many many apress books, they seem to be pretty well written.
Other books I like: Not complete tho....
PHP and MySQL Web Development- Developers library 4th edition, Luke welling Laura Thomson, 969 pages, has really follow me step by step projects. Nice book to learn or reinforce info.
Beginning PHP and Mysql E-commerce- from novice to Professional 2nd edition by Cristian Darie and Emilian Balanescu,,, contains how to walk through step by step how to create a t-shirt shop project/product catalog/shopping cart,product recomendations, and so so so much more a very thorough walkthrough of start to finish e-commerce, although I do not think this is a beginner book for understanding php,
You must remember there will be code errors in every book after reading many I can say it is every book, but after a while you spot the error and can fix them, it is not possible to have a 100% accurate book it is too easy to leave out a ; " ' . > < ? / \ {}[] or whatever or mess up a variable name.
Excellent Beginner Tutorial and Reference Book
This book covers so much topics and assumes the reader is new to PHP. Excellent for PHP beginners and as lookup reference for intermediate/advanced programmers. Definitely a must to have book in your desk.
A very useful book 
Some books you can tell are a labor of love by someone who knows their subject well and is really trying to impart that to his readers. This is one of those books. It covers a lot of ground, with a lot of code snippets. As someone who's new to PHP and MySql, it's been very useful -- I can pretty count on finding the information I need there -- explanations along with code examples so it's easy to both understand it and see the code.
Originally I gave it 5 stars, but after using it for a while and especially getting into the SQL half more, I've downgraded it because it's surprisingly not thorough in how to drive MySQL from PHP. A number of times I could find what needs to be done in SQL but not see how to accomplish it with PHP code, that I had to look up elsewhere. To be sure there are two good chapters on just this, but given the title and audience for the book, you'd think it would be a constant throughout. For example, try to find out how to Insert or Update database rows -- it's not covered (actually in this case, he doesn't give the SQL either). But this just brings it from 5 stars to 4, it's still a very good book.
Great Purchase
Beginning PHP and MYSQL is definitely for the beginner. That is exactly where I am at. The book describes in detail both of these technologies.
I recommend this book if you are looking at creating PHP pages and interfacing them with MySql...
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