Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Simple, Detailed, Illustrative
Comment: "PHP, MySQL and Apache All in One" is a good way to begin learning those technologies. It is simple enough and has lots of visual examples, code examples, tables, figures, etc to break down bigger concepts into manageable ones. Also, its an easy read. I normally don't rate anything perfectly, but I couldn't think of any reason why I wouldn't give it 5 stars. I must add though that I may be biased since I wasn't a beginner to PHP or MySQL and used this textbook for a grad course.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Trouble at first then smooth sailing
Comment: Like some others who left reviews, I'm a complete beginner to coding, php, mysql, and apache. Given that, I found the installation utterly confusing and spent three days unable to get past chapter 4 where the real content is. A tip for others like me, skip the manual installation. The author cautions about using pre-configured instances of the software, but I found WAMP5 to be a life saver. It's pre-configured and comes in an MSI file. However, as much as I hate to admit it, the struggles I faced in trying to follow the instructions did teach me a lot about the basic configuration, even if that wasn't the author's intent. Since then, I've found the content to be good and am gaining a fundamental understanding of the tools. I know this won't be the end-all php, apache, mysql bible, but it's a good place to start.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An advanced book & not for beginners
Comment: I am stuck on chapters three and four and can not continue with this book. I could not get Apache to work with PHP. In the "Troubleshooting" section of the book on page 58 the solution to getting Apache to work is this: To solve this problem, you need to stop the running server or change the Apache configuration to listen on a different port. Well, if you know how to do this, buy the book. If you don't, you are forever suck and can't continue with the rest of the book. I tried to change the ports and address as suggested in the book, but it didn't work. Be sure to read "Who Should Read This Book" in the introduction section of the book. I probably don't have the required experience to work the material in this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Decent if you're patient
Comment: This is good for those who have incredible amounts of patience and like solving problems. The setup alone took at least three hours and a lot of searching on Google. Many important steps are left out (such as how to add and use a database from the MySQL command line, how to configure PHP to support mysqli, and how to configure Apache properly to support PHP.) The PHP functions used in this book are the mysqli_* family and require special setup in the php.ini file. There are no instructions however to set this up. Without this you can't write any SQL programs.
There are also numerous typos in the code. It's obvious that none of the code in this book is actually tested to see if it works. There are simple things such as variable name inconsistencies and function typos that throw off the whole script. When you're new to a progamming language these aren't easy to spot.
Overall, however, there is still plenty you can take from this book. If you have the patience the problem solving will probably cement the concepts more solidly in your brain because you will be figuring them out for yourself.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not helpful
Comment: One of the worst "beginner" books I've read for computer programming. The book frequently directs the reader to external web pages for critical tasks... and I'm thinking, "Gee. I bought the book to walk me through this". The code is poorly explained. The examples frequently didn't work. Steps are omitted.
If you want to split your time between a book and online searches for manuals... this book is for you. If you want to get your $35 worth of a book and expect to have it be enough (not the end all, be all, but enough) of a beginning... go elsewhere.
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