Practical PHP and MySQL: Building Eight Dynamic Web Applications [With CDROM]

Like all the other reviews are saying, there are dozens of typos in the projects, neglected lines of code, deprecated code, and a lot of sloppy mistakes. But I can say one positive thing about this book: If it's teaching me anything, it's how to troubleshoot and error check! All those errors are making me a better developer. I don't want to forgive Prentice Hall for printing this book with SO MANY ERRORS, but if it weren't for those mistakes, I probably wouldn't understand PHP and MySQL nearly as well. If you can find it for cheap, I do recommend picking it up just to get some really good troubleshooting practice. Edit: After going through several of the chapters, I have started to recommend it to my friends. I warn them that the code won't work the way it's written in the book, but if they actually pay attention to what they're typing, the typos are really easy to spot. The projects are extensible enough that you can mix and match the applications and build some really cool and exciting websites with them! Use this book with the intention of become a better programmer-- not to use it for some neat-o tricks that you'll forget out to build once you put the book down.

This book promises to be good. The delivery was very quick and I am looking forward to an exciting study sessions. As always, it was a Good business. Thanks a lot for this material

A handy thing about Bacon's book is the CD with the full source code for the 8 applications referred to in the title. This lets him in the narrative concentrate on the key points in building each application. Since you should know from your own experience that any nontrivial app has tons of routine code. The problem is finding (or writing) the crucial code snippets, that encapsulate the key operations. The examples he gives have been deliberately chosen to be as useful as possible to a wide readership. Like making a shopping cart. Which obviously necessitates hooking to a database with item descriptions and prices. These can be often read only. But the database also needs to be written to, with the user's purchase and various data that the user enters about herself, like a shipping address. The shopping cart is the archetypal example for ecommerce websites. On perhaps a more casual note, another chapter describes how to make a blogging website. No ecommerce here. But there is still a need to read and write to a back end database. You should be aware that the book is not primarily meant to be a first text in either PHP or MySQL. Ideally, you will come to it with some background in both. Its task is to demonstrate how to integrate the two. Frankly, the method of writing PHP commands as HTML comments into an HTML web page (=file) is a total kludge. But that's scarcely the author's fault. It's an ingenious approach used industry wide. Purists in writing source code in some language can reasonably decry the typical code shown in the text. Pragmatically, it works and you should get used to this style.