Customer Rating:  
Summary: Not really good
Comment: This book does not contain a complete information about php and mySQL, it's just talking about the e-commerce thing.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Comment: I picked this book up as a total PHP beginner and was creating useful applications quickly. The examples are excellent and walk you through processes step by step. Now that I know more about PHP from different sources I can see that there are some gaps in information in this book, but I'd definitely recommend it to beginners. It helps if you've already done a little scripting.Just one thing: why is this edition more expensive than the new second edition???
Customer Rating:
Summary: Decent book for beginners
Comment: This book has some great examples on how to utilize PHP along with MySQL but I thought that the book included too much information on setting up MySQL queries and not enough on the intricacies of PHP. PHP is a very interesting language and although this book provides a good framework with which you could use as a launching pad into the web development arena, there are many issues which are not addressed in this book adequately. Nevertheless, it is good buy if you're looking for something which will get you started on the right foot with web development.
Customer Rating:
Summary: not much about MySQL, but very useful sample projects
Comment: This book should not have "MySQL" in the title because it has very little emphasis on database design and programming. I bought because I thought it would discuss both PHP and MySQL equally, but its database discussion is cursory. It doesn't even discuss normalization. So I was initially very disappointed with the book. But now that my expectations have been adjusted (and I have purchased other books that talk specifically about MySQL), I now appreciate the book for what it does offer.The best part of this book is the advanced projects in the back. These are not just toys, but skeletons of real world systems. By adapting the examples in Chapters 24 and 25, I was able to build a very nice shopping cart with authentication for a real-world Web site. One nit... The authors' programming style drives me NUTS. It's modular to the point of insanity. I know some people like this way of doing things, but to me it's spaghetti code. They split things into zillions of different functions in zillions of different files. Many of the functions are one-liners. So to figure out how something works, you have to hunt through file upon file to find the real code. I had to read the sample code with a GREP program handy so when I opened one file to see calls to five other functions, I could find the other functions and then the functions THEY call, etc., etc., etc. Why does anyone think this way of coding is clear?? But this is a style issue. Another style nit... The spacing in the code is weird. Either there are no spaces at all (e.g. xxx&&yyy) or everything is spaced evenly with no grouping (e.g. type = text name = Foo). Either way, it's hard to read. I found a few coding errors, but this is to be expected in a project so large. Except for the style issues, the code was mostly good. Despite its drawbacks, on the whole I've found the book very useful--mainly for the example projects in the back. I apparently bought this book weeks before the second edition was released. ::sigh::
Customer Rating:
Summary: Confusing and Incomplete.
Comment: This book was hard to follow in places and the code included with the book didn't seem to work half the time. Trying the simple examples given on page 506 (Listing 24.4) I spend good part of an 8 hour work day trying all kinds of things to make that simple script to work, but to no avail. I eliminated the if statement, the only code in the example, and it worked. This experience and the haphazard presentation and confusing explanations of the examples that followed I gave up on using the code in this book and found alternative examples elsewhere.On a positive note this book has a good introduction to SQL functions.
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