PHP and MySQL for Dummies John Wiley & Sons Inc ( 30 April, 2002 ) Book Our Price : £ 11.37 List Price : £ 18.95 You save £7.58 (40% off) Prices subject to change. usually dispatched within 24 hours.

Saved My Career

Im an ideas man and at work I had an idea to use a .php page to connect to a MySQL database and retrieve store information, call notes, and much more. I would not have had this idea if it wasnt for this book. It taught me the basics - even helped me set up PHP and MySQL on my local machine so I now have a server! I had fun getting to the few errors - all part of the learning curve and could be the author, "just testing you". Im going to move on to the next level of books now that this book has given me a firm foundation to build upon. Easy to understand and follow, not too heavy, free cd. This book is on my desk all the time as its great reference material once youve read it.

Excellant choice for beginners

This book is great for beginners who want to learn php & mysql to deliver dynamic web pages. Having coded in many different languages for many years I wondered if this book would be a little too beginner friendly for me. This wasnt the case and it introduced me to what potentially php & mysql combined can do, the possibilites are literally endless. The book comes with handy code snippets and a cd with php pages to get you going, the author never leads you off track and doesnt cloud the whole point of the book - to give the reader an understanding of php and basic programming principles. When I finished reading the book it left me with too many ideas of what to start my next project on. Of course to extend your knowledge of php & mysql after reading the book you will have to find some more reading material online, but because its an open source language the web is crawling with forums and tutorials to help you out. Want to learn php & mysql but not sure where to start? buy this book :)

Good book, but out of date

This is a good introduction book for someone who is new to PHP and Mysql. If you want to play with PHP and Mysql on your own PC where you have your own Apache running, then this book can teach you a lot about how things work. But if you are planning to build a site for yourself which other people will visit. Then dont buy this book. The reason is that from version 4.3, the default PHP setting REGISTER_GLOBALS is FALSE, due to security reasons. This means that you will have to write your codes in a much different way. While in this book it still assumes that REGISTER_GOLBALS=ON. If your Hosting company has REGISTER_GLOBALS=OFF, none of the example script will work anymore. And you dont want REGISTER_GLOBAL=ON, because it is insecure. Of course there are walkarounds, but for newbies it is better to have a clean start. Now I have almost finished the book, and I have to find another book to learn how to write codes in the new way.