What do eBay, Amazon.com and CNN.com have in common? They're all applications that integrate large databases with the Web. The popularity (and power) of these applications stems from their accessibility and usability: thousands of users can access the same data at the same time without theneed to install any additional software on their computers. Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL offers web developers a mixture of theoretical and practical information on creating web database applications. Using PHP, and MySQL, two open source technologies that are often combined to develop web applications, the book offers detailed information on designing relational databases and on web application architecture, both of which will be useful to readers who have never dealt with these issues before. The book also introduces Hugh and Dave's Online Wines, a complete (but fictional) online retail site that allows users to browse, search a database, add items to a shopping cart, manage their membership, and purchase wines. Using this site as an example, the book shows you how to implement searching and browsing, store user data, validate user input, manage transactions, and maintain security. If you want to build small to medium-scale web database applications that can run on modest hardware and process more than a million hits a day from users, this book will show you how.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 57 Ratings

Errata Galore - 2008-09-09
Reviewer Rating:
New to PHP and haven't touched SQL in quite a few years. I was looking for a good beginning PHP book, not overly simplified as I have some programming experience. I needed to see how PHP and MySQL were to interact and how to set up everything on my machine (Mac). I've used MANY O'Reilly books and they're always topnotch, but this one is so disappointing to me as I find it is riddled with errors and typos. It is one thing to see typos in text and another thing altogether to have to figure out what a mistake in a code example is supposed to say. I expected more, especially since it's a 2nd edition. If it wasn't for all the forums on the web, I never even would have gotten Apache/PHP/MySQL up and running. This book isn't useless. Just not good.

A straight-forward made-easy presentation - 2009-06-29
Reviewer Rating:
This has been my first ever book purchase through Amazon. I was quite fortunate to select this book. Clear cut presentations, abundance of samples and professional reasoning.
I fully recommend this book, both to novice users and IT professionals!

Great book - 2009-02-27
Reviewer Rating:
I think this is one of the best buys you can do, the book is clear, useful and with a just price, 100% recommendable.

Good Book, Serious ERRORS - 2008-07-28
Reviewer Rating:
This is a good book with a nice overview of the stated subjects.

However, I cannot evaluate the application presented because the appendix on installing Easy PHP on Microsoft Windows has SO MANY ERRORS that I simply cannot get this software running. In particular the PEAR installation instructions are just completely wrong.

I will try a Linux environment next, since I can debug better in that environment.

MySQl-PHP textbook - 2007-02-18
Reviewer Rating:
As usual in text books, there is a lot of useless information that is not necessary, but since writers are paid by the word, this is to be expected.

I wish there was a section on MySQL commands.

Browse Similar Topics

Top Level Categories:
Databases
Programming

Sub-Categories:
Databases > MySQL
Databases > Web/Internet Database
Programming > PHP