Laura Thomson

This book changed me from a web user to a web designer. It gave me the tools to build the back-end of a website. The unseen portion of a website is where all the work gets done and makes the site become useful for others. PHP and MySQL are still my favorite programs for scripting and database storage. This book is dated but I still use it as a reference. It always points me to the right online reference either by suggestion or a direct link. I would recommend this for the beginner to intermediate. Enjoy!… (more)

Here's part 1 of my "PHP and MySQL Web Development" book review.

I think this is a well organized and well written book. It starts right off with a solid review of PHP. For an ad hoc PHP hacker like myself, that chapter 1 review was very good. It helped organize my somewhat scattered knowledge of PHP, and I learned a few new details right off.

From there, the authors take you right into a nice, concrete example of implementing a basic e-commerce site in PHP. The initial project is pretty basic, but I found it very useful in refreshing and solidifying what I already knew. The example has you persisting data to and reading it back from a file, but at the same time the authors are preparing you with additional information about why a file is less than ideal as
a data store.

After that it's back to PHP school with reviews of arrays and regular expressions. Again, the material is thorough and well presented, and I found I learned a few more new bits.

Chapter 5 gets us into what I guess I'd call intermediate PHP, here they are starting to get you into modularity with putting PHP functions in their own files, starting to get you into the idea of separating presentation and content. At this point we also get introduced to PHP classes, and this is all starting to be woven into the ways that PHP can be used to build complex websites with reusable blocks of code.

I am just now getting into the MySQL part. One recommendation I'd make, if you are trying to put together web server, PHP and MySQL, go with a competent ready-to-roll LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) distro. I built
from scratch on a SuSE Linux, and while it was interesting and educational, it also took quite a bit of work.

The MySQL part follows the model of using a fairly realistic if somewhat simple bookstore application for the example. I'm hoping that this will lead to some nice class-packaged MySQL interface that I can then apply to some of my little personal web apps.

Hopefully I'll have more about that in part 2 before too long.… (more)

This is a fantastic book and most of my website is based on the code within it. I always kept this book to hand for several years, and often referred to it, though I've now reached the stage where I no longer need it. My one concern is that there is not enough emphasis on security, and some of the code is inherently insecure. One example is the authors' practice of putting the database username and password inside the PHP file itself. This is a very bad thing to do. Those details should be stored outside the web root. The PHP file can access them via an include statement. Hopefully that's been addressed in a later edition.… (more)