Customer Rating: 
Summary: Little comments from the author...
Comment: Hi guys, first of all, thanks for actually considering buying this book. I do appreciate all reviews, whether they are good or bad, as this is the very first book I wrote. I do have to say in response to T.Arora that I did spend a lot of time writing this book (took me over a year), and the reason I did not include more images was a contractual restrictions. I was told to write a book of about 300 pages, and adding images would have made me go way over board. I felt it was more important to concentrate on explanations and the actual code. After that, you could always write the code and see what it looks like.
I do hope you read it till the end. I've heard good things about the last chapter, when everything gets together. Hopefully you will like my examples a little better. :)
For those thinking on whether or not to buy the book, realize that this book is about learning how to make database-driven websites, not how to make pretty pages. If you want to learn tricks and dangers of Web programming, the book can definitely help you. If you just want to learn Web design and how to choose colors, get a different book.
Thanks to all of you that have purchased it so far! :)
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Quick N Dirty Job
Comment: Have read 40% of the book so far. There are many places where visual aspects are discussed, and there are no visual illustrations!!. The book is clearly aimed at people whose knowledge is elementary in the areas being discussed, and yet there is no attempt to make it easy for the reader to learn. Also, the examples are unimaginative.
On the bright side, I like the casual conversational style.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I Wish I'd Had This Book When I Started Web Programming
Comment: This is the book I wish I had had when I was starting to set up my Books-On-Line web site. Here in one simple step is just about half of what you need to know to set up a fairly complex database driven web site. I say about half of what you need to know because he spends no time at all on appearance, type fonts, color, illustrations, all that stuff. As he says in the introduction, he's not good at that (neither am I), and for those subjects you need another book.
But for a functioning web site he recommends what is sometimes called LAMP - for Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP. To summarize why:
The software is FREE, a very good price.
It doesn't crash as often
It runs faster so you can use a slower computer.
By the time you finish, you'll probably want at least one book on each of these software packages, but here is an excellent place to start. It gives you enough to get started and you only need to go deeper into each of these packages when you start getting fancier. The nice thing about this book is that it gives you everything you need to get started in a well written, easy to understand way.
Mr. Gabarro, there are two things I would suggest for your next edition: One, include a cd of a working collection of the four packages rather than saying go get any distribution, and two, talk a little about past and emerging technologies such as Cold Fusion for the past, and Ruby on Rails for the future. I'd be interested in your opinions.
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