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 59 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.

Somewhat Sluggish - 2010-02-02
Reviewer Rating:
Here is, in my opinion, the way this book should be used.

First, learn very basic PHP from [...]

Make a few sample pages for yourself using as many techniques on the site as you can. After that, make your way to the book. Up until page 134, it's just dry syntax. You can learn dry syntax much faster from the website I listed. You'll be able to skim across the first 134 pages with your knowledge, and since it will look somewhat familiar, you won't get bored out of your mind.

When you start actually getting in to mysql implementation, you can start reading the page over.

I highly suggest that you read along and make your own project that you will find interesting instead of the project provided. I'm using this book to make an inventory application for a pretend game store website, and it's keeping me much more interested than when I was making the winestore example.

Some of the functions don't work, such as the selectDistinct, but I didn't find that too annoying. The book uses some outdated techniques such as ereg for regular expressions, but that's because the book itself is slightly outdated.

Don't try to read the book cover to cover and then try to go apply what you learned. You'll just end up having to read the book again. Digest the book in chunks and actually CREATE something with it!

One final word: Do NOT attempt to install Apache, PHP, and MySQL using the book. I lost so many hours that way. Just look up some forum posts on how to do it manually using the zip files as opposed to the MSI installer.

Outdated - 2009-12-26
Reviewer Rating:
This book is outdated. Get a newer version for a better understanding of PHP 5. Besides being outdated, the book is written very well. It's set up as a tutorial on how to build an e-commerce site with PHP and MySQL. Along the way the authors teach you valuable lessons about PHP, MySQL, Database design, and application design. If there's a newer version of this book then I would recommend getting that one.

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.

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