The authors, Luke Welling and Laura Thomson, have clearly done their homework on their audience. They have written a book that provides easy, step-by-step instructions on creating the components that web site owners want, including:

- Password protect your site - how to create user authentication. Includes a section on generating random passwords and mailing them to the user.
- Build a personalized shopping cart
- Personalize web content based on session control
- A content management system - a web-based system for non-computer users to add new stories without touching an HTML editor
- Mailing list manager; mail HTML or text-based mail to everyone on your list automatically
- Web forums for user discussions
- Automated content retrieval off of the web (get stock quotes automatically from other web sites, etc.)
- Setting up simple file transfer functions (FTP) for uploading files
- Automatic simple image generation (i.e. buttons and graphs) - the ideas in this chapter can be easily extended to making page counters, etc.
- Generate personalized PDF files automatically (useful for creating printable, non-editable documents)

In addition to going over the basics of PHP and MySQL, the Authors provide some excellent discussion about setting up good quality e-commerce sites and the use of encryption.

There are a couple of minor shortcomings in this book. The Authors provide only a cursory treatment to using SSL (secure socket layers) in web transactions. SSL is an essential component of modern day e-commerce, and I would have liked to have seen a more detailed discussion about setting up and running SSL; oddly, the authors recommend buying a $1000 server package with preconfigured SSL rather than using the open souce SSL package which is available from the Apache website. Secondly, the slant of the book is angled towards Unix/Linux systems (which is not unexpected, as most servers run off of Linux/Unix); Windows users will need to make slight, but not scary, alterations in code. In most cases, the files can be copied straight off the CD and will run equally well in Unix/Linux versus Windows systems.

In summary, this is an outstanding computer book on building a useful and interactive web site, powered entirely by free software. The authors take a complicated subject and make it easy to understand. Rather than focusing on abstract theory or dabbling in mundane details, this book provides step-by-step instructions that lets you set up a full-featured and powerful web site with a minimum of hassle.