Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent learning tool
Comment: I have a background in Visual Basic which definitely helped. The Chapter about setting up the Linux server I just skipped over but the rest of the book has been very good so far. I would recommend this book to anyone who has some programming experience (any, really) and would like to get into web database programming.
It will also be valuable as a reference later on.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Comment: I was a beginer at PHP and MySql when I bought this book. Now I feel comfortable doing alot of coding for personal and business use. The book explains things in a consice step by step manner with tons of real world examples. The author is very easy to read and the book reads like he is having a conversation with you. This is a great book to have in your collection from beginner to expert. NICE JOB Jason!!!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good coding, bad editing.
Comment: I've been a PHP programmer for a few years now. I picked up this book (1) to find a good book for people new to PHP and (2) to introducte me to some of the new features of PHP 5. In my opinion, this book does both very well. While it is good to approach this book with some knowledge of programming concepts already under your belt, the book does serve as a good starter guide to PHP. It starts with the basics and builds from there. The overview of the material is excellent, and the chapters on MySQL cover the MySQL features most likely to be useful to PHP programmers.
The biggest fault I have with this book are numerous errors in the writing. The editors should have given the book one more good read-through. The code itself tends to be good, it's the explanations that sometimes don't match the code. The errors tend to be pretty minor and the alert reader won't have any problem realizing the mistake. Still, my wife has gotten tired of my exclamations of, "Here's another one!"
On the whole a great book that does what it claims to do. I have already recommended this book to others and will continue to do so.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very, very helpful.
Comment: This is a very, very helpful book. I learned a lot of things. I usually used to read articles on the internet about PHP but this book has all they had PLUS more explanation and why things do. For instance, I only knew 3 error reporting codes and this book teached me 13! Nice stuff.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Continued Fan
Comment: I finally made it through my copy of Beginning PHP and MySQL 5, by programming guru W. Jason Gilmore. The technical editor was Matt Wade, founder of CodeWalkers, a great PHP and MySQL resource site. It is the Second Edition follow-up to PHP 5 and MySQL. Since I've already written a review of the First Edition, I will try to mainly focus on the changes to the second version of the book, which cover some of the newer features in each of the technologies.
At the initial time of printing for the first book, many PHP 5 features were only in the beta version, and MySQL 5 was still in alpha testing. Now, eighteen months later, they have solidified into what has become quite a formidable enterprise solution for server-side scripting and database storage.
There has been quite a bit of extra material covered this time around, to the tune of 177 additional pages. In fact, by comparison the new edition is noticeably heavier than its predecessor. The existing chapters have also been revised, with XHTML examples being given in most cases instead of HTML, as well as minor changes to some of the updated / deprecated syntax.
A total of seven new chapters have been added, further enriching what was already a great resource. One of the more interesting subjects covered is the new mysqli() extension. It is encapsulated into a class, allowing you to access a database more easily than the older, procedural method. It also offers an object oriented interface for handling transactions, adding code efficiency.
Aside from offering informative chapters, there are also several good tutorials, such as creating a mortgage calculator which will compute accumulated interest over time. Another cool one was a how-to on rendering a dynamic tabular calendar by using a PEAR package and less than 30 lines of actual code.
I could go on and on, but if you really want to dig into this powerful open-source combo, you're going to have to read the book for yourself. By the author's own admission, "this isn't a romance novel," but if you don't mind some heavy reading this could be right up your alley. Happy hypertext pre-processing!
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