Foundation PHP 5 for Flash

"Foundation PHP 5 for Flash" by David Powers is a great book, as I've come to expect from both David Powers and his publisher, Friends of ED. The word "Foundation" in the title may lead you to think this is a beginner's book; it decidedly is not. As stated on the back cover, the book is aimed at the "reasonably experienced Flash user who has mastered the basics." I'd even say that it takes a mastery of more than just the basics to get the most out of this book. Without a very good knowledge of ActionScript, much of the material would be difficult to follow. That being said, this book is not about ActionScript. It's not even really about Flash. It's a book about PHP -- and a very, very good book about PHP at that. It's also a book about MySQL. Prior to the most advanced chapters, the tie-in with Flash (and ActionScript) is said in one word: LoadVars. Once you get past that, you can pretty much forget about ActionScript for much of the book and focus on learning PHP and MySQL. Although the book does show by example how to get variables between your Flash user and LoadVars in ActionScript, you really do need to be comfortable with the ins and outs of Flash in general and ActionScript in particular in order to make full use of those examples, and this is not the book for learning that part of it. In the more advanced chapters, more ActionScript comes into play, and it can get confusing if you're not already comfortable with it. (I'd liken diving into this book without knowing ActionScript or PHP to learning to speak Spanish and Italian at the same time: at some point, you're going to say "dónde" when you mean to say "dove.") What this book does cover extremely well is everything that happens on the back end, outside of Flash. The chapters that introduce PHP do much more than just introduce it: they are an excellent tutorial in the language that would even be a great resource for people who just want to learn PHP without having anything to do with Flash. Concepts are explained clearly and completely, and the examples are extremely useful and illustrative. The same can be said for the MySQL chapters: You really do learn MySQL, and not just by breezing through one or two superficial examples as in most PHP books. The nuts-and-bolts chapters are particularly brilliant. David Powers's walk-throughs on installing Apache, PHP and MySQL are legendary. You simply couldn't ask for a better guide! The appendices -- including 20 whole pages on various things that might go wrong and what to do about it -- are indispensable. My only criticism is of the often convoluted examples. The author's style is to build up the examples iteratively, retracing and revising the code, step by step, over many pages as you learn new techniques. He will often walk you through the "obvious-but-wrong" way of doing something, then make changes little by little, introducing new concepts along the way. While this is perhaps a good way of learning, it sometimes f

Foundation PHP5 for Flash is the most useful tutorial book I have ever laid my hands on. I'm an Actionscripter by nature and I had never written a single php script on my own before touching this book. I really wasn't too sure where to start other than firing up Dreamweaver and hoping it would take care of everything for me. This book took my hand in the first couple of chapters and led me through a custom installation of php5 and apache on my own computer for development purposes. David Powers walks you through the installation with ease and shows you the necessary screenshots so that you'll never get lost. I'll definitely keep this book with me to whenever I install php and apache on other computers. I found php to be fairly easy to learn considering its similarities with Actionscript. Powers covers passing variables between php and flash in detail (it should be second nature to you if you ever used the loadVars() function for loading XML or text files). The real breakthrough for me was when he started explaining MySQL. I never knew that working with MySQL was so easy, I guess that's all thanks to phpMyAdmin which he covers in the book. The second I pulled a database entry from MySQL using php then passing it into flash, I knew I had unlocked the most important skill I can have as a web developer. That's exactly why you need this book. In conclusion, Powers gives you just enough information that you'll be able to take off an experiment with the things that you have learned throughout the book. "Foundation" is the perfect word to describe what you walk away with when you put this book down. If you're looking to pull sorted information from databases and store information into databases using Flash and php then you need this book. (...) -John Lindquist

Unlike many overpriced computer tutorial books, this book delivers on it's promises. Yes this book shows you how to put your Flash front-end on a PHP/mySQL, database-driven backend in a simple and direct fashion, but more importantly it clarifies lots of the details that are left out in many online and book-based tutorials. This book took me out of the hazy fog of uncertainty regarding the integration between Flash and PHP and right into the realm of coding my own PHP back-ends. Powers takes a unique and interesting approach by delineating the similarities between Flash's own scripting language, Actionscript, and PHP. PHP and Actionscript, it turns out, are very similar in syntax and have many common functions. This allows anyone with some knowledge of Actionscript to immediately get a grip on PHP. MySQL is similarly illuminated in this book. Powers, in his section titled "The four essential SQL commands", does in four pages what other books take chapters to do: he outlines just the mySQL you need to get the job done in a direct and clear manner. This part of the book alone is worth the cost of the whole volume. The tutorials and code samples in this book are all useful and, again unlike other computer code books, require no visits to an errata page to figure out how to make them work--they all work as shown. And don't be fooled by the title--this book works just fine for PHP 4, the predominant version deployed by web hosting companies today.

This book does what it promises. I'm learning a ton of PHP stuff but ,unlike the other books sitting half read in a stack, I don't feel as if I'm straying way off from my goal. This book teaches the PHP foundation but ties it in with Flash like I need it to. I was hoping for more coverage of amfphp and more talk of PHP playing well with the V2 components but- I learned more PHP in this book because it kept my interest by being Flash relevant- and I think the foundation I've picked up as well as those great database classes have me well on my way approaching other PHP books and picking out the stuff I need knowing I have a the basics down.

The dot.com bubble is long gone from the general public's perception, but one thing is for certain - experienced Flash web designers are one of the most overworked set of people at the moment. Since the last two quarters of 2004, my Flash design consulting work has gone through the roof (and this all the more noticeable because 2003 was *very* quiet for Flash web design). From talking to other web designers, it is apparent that their phones are also red hot at the moment (summer 2005). There is a problem though. These new clients don't just want a clever user interface, or some multimedia content. They invariably want Flash to be the front end of a web application. In such projects, Flash is the cool and friendly front end of a server driven system rather than a standalone web interface Theres a lot of demand out there for flash developers that know about XML, PHP and mySQL, because these are the three technologies most commonly used. Knowing these technologies *and* Flash is also a sure way to double your customer base (and usually also increase your hourly rate...). The good news is that unlike all competing proprietary systems, XML, PHP and mySQL are all free. They are open source systems. All you have to do is get them installed on your computer, set up a local and web host, and you have everything you need to start developing or learning. Um... that's the first of three problems though... PHP and mySQL are created for the open source community, and that means they don't come in a nice box with a hologram, read-me and an installer that only needs to know which directory you want to install to. You also need something like Apache installed and running, and theres one or two other apps that make life easier (such as phpMyAdmin). Many designers have been put off by this... you need to install several pieces of software in exactly the right order, and all of them have to work *at the same time* for you to get anywhere. The first problem solved by this book is that it assumes only knowledge of Flash and basic web design skills, so it leads you by the hand in getting a fully integrated dev system installed and running. I can't tell you how useful this is - open source software is free, but the downside is that it assumes that you know what you are doing! The second problem is that there's just so much information to take in. Previously, I went out and got several books on PHP, SQL and Apache (plus a few other technologies that I later found were not even needed or were rarely used options), and just didn't know where to start on getting it all up and running with Flash. It took me a good few months to get anywhere. What was missing for me was a book that took Flash as the starting point rather than expect me to figure out where Flash fits in with all these confusing new technologies. This book goes through the required technologies with a Flash-facing sensibility - `you know Flash already, so I'll start from there and introduce you sl