Customer Rating:  
Summary: I finally got into PHP and what start
Comment: The samples are so clean clear that makes PHP easy to follow, if you are new to PHP this a must have after reading any beginners PHP book
Customer Rating:
Summary: devoted to web applications
Comment: Someone new to both PHP and MySQL might ask, why this combination? Why should I learn both in tandem? Because, as the authors explain, in many practical situations this duo is used by programmers; especially for web applications. This is really an implicit subtitle for the book. What you learn here is that PHP and MySQL live for the web.
The chapters are characterised by application examples all devoted to the web. As in writing web pages for a community forum. The pages are coded in PHP, and the data created by users is then stored in a MySQL backend database. This overall method is followed in other examples. The PHP code samples seem easy to understand. The language has been found, or more accurately, it has been revved into its current version, such that much code is indeed easy to write and understand, and not just the text's examples.
To be sure, the book is not about the theory of relational databases. Only the simplest of tables is used within MySQL. Yes, there is discussion about the tables used in each example. But it is really limited, to anyone who knows the subject. For a comprehensive usage of MySQL, you do need to look elsewhere.
One chapter, on shopping cart code, complements a recent book on e-commerce, Wiley Pathways E-Business (Wiley Pathways). It spoke to non-programmers about the travails of starting an e-commerce website. A requirement was for a shopping cart. One way is to hire a programmer. Expensive. But if you are that programmer, consider looking at the extended example offered in the current text. It is extensive enough that it could be used as a code base for your task.
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