PHP and MySQL Web Development 4th Edition by Luke Welling (PDF)

Description

Provides an in-depth guide to combining the two open source tools to create dynamic Web sites, updated to incorporate the new features of PHP 5.1 and MySQL 5.1, that encompasses a new section on Ajax, enhanced focus on security issues and Web security, coverage of the PEAR repository of PHP extensions and applications, and new projects. Original. (Intermediate)

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “This book by Welling & Thomson is theonly one which I have found to be indispensable.The writing is clear and straightforwardbut never wastes my time.The book isextremely well laid out.The chapters are theright length and chapter titles quickly takeyou where you want to go.”–Wright Sullivan, President, A&EEngineering, Inc., Greer South Carolina”There are several good introductorybooks on PHP, but Welling & Thomson is anexcellent handbook for those who wish tobuild up complex and reliable systems. It’sobvious that the authors have a strong backgroundin the development of professionalapplications and they teach not onlythe language itself, but also how to use itwith good software engineering practices.”–Javier Garcia, senior telecom engineer, Telefonica R&D Labs, Madrid”This book rocks! I am an experiencedprogrammer, so I didn’t need a lot of helpwith PHP syntax; after all, it’s very close toC/C++. I don’t know a thing aboutdatabases, though, so when I wanted todevelop a book review engine (amongother projects) I wanted a solid referenceto using MySQL with PHP. I haveO’Reilly’s mSQL and MySQL book, andit’s probably a better pure-SQL reference, but this book has earned a place on myreference shelf…Highly recommended.”–Paul Robichaux”The true PHP/MySQL bible, PHPand MySQL Web Development by LukeWelling and Laura Thomson, made merealize that programming and databases arenow available to the commoners. Again, Iknow 1/10000th of what there is to know, and already I’m enthralled.”–Tim Luoma, TnTLuoma.com”This book by Welling & Thomson is the only one which I have found to be indispensable.The writing is clear and straightforward but never wastes my time.The book is extremely well laid out.The chapters are the right length and chapter titles quickly take you where you want to go.”–Wright Sullivan, President, A&EEngineering, Inc., Greer South Carolina “There are several good introductory books on PHP, but Welling & Thomson is an excellent handbook for those who wish to build up complex and reliable systems. It’s obvious that the authors have a strong background in the development of professional applications and they teach not only the language itself, but also how to use it with good software engineering practices.”–Javier Garcia, senior telecom engineer, Telefonica R&D Labs, Madrid “This book rocks! I am an experienced programmer, so I didn’t need a lot of help with PHP syntax; after all, it’s very close to C/C++. I don’t know a thing about databases, though, so when I wanted to develop a book review engine (among other projects) I wanted a solid reference to using MySQL with PHP. I have O’Reilly’s mSQL and MySQL book, and it’s probably a better pure-SQL reference, but this book has earned a place on my reference shelf…Highly recommended.”–Paul Robichaux “The true PHP/MySQL bible, PHP and MySQL Web Development by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson, made me realize that programming and databases are now available to the commoners. Again, I know 1/10000th of what there is to know, and already I’m enthralled.”–Tim Luoma, TnTLuoma.com This book by Welling & Thomson is the only one which I have found to be indispensable.The writing is clear and straightforward but never wastes my time.The book is extremely well laid out.The chapters are the right length and chapter titles quickly take you where you want to go. Wright Sullivan, President, A&EEngineering, Inc., Greer South Carolina There are several good introductory books on PHP, but Welling & Thomson is an excellent handbook for those who wish to build up complex and reliable systems. It s obvious that the authors have a strong background in the development of professional applications and they teach not only the language itself, but also how to use it with good software engineering practices. Javier Garcia, senior telecom engineer, Telefonica R&D Labs, Madrid This book rocks! I am an experienced programmer, so I didn t need a lot of help with PHP syntax; after all, it s very close to C/C++. I don t know a thing about databases, though, so when I wanted to develop a book review engine (among other projects) I wanted a solid reference to using MySQL with PHP. I have O Reilly s mSQL and MySQL book, and it s probably a better pure-SQL reference, but this book has earned a place on my reference shelf Highly recommended. Paul Robichaux The true PHP/MySQL bible, PHP and MySQL Web Development by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson, made me realize that programming and databases are now available to the commoners. Again, I know 1/10000th of what there is to know, and already I m enthralled. Tim Luoma, TnTLuoma.com ” From the Back Cover PHP and MySQL are popular open-source technologies that are ideal for quickly developing database-driven Web applications. PHP is a powerful scripting language designed to enable developers to create highly featured Web applications quickly, and MySQL is a fast, reliable database that integrates well with PHP and is suited for dynamic Internet-based applications. “PHP and MySQL Web Development” shows how to use these tools together to produce effective, interactive Web applications. It clearly describes the basics of the PHP language, explains how to set up and work with a MySQL database, and then shows how to use PHP to interact with the database and the server. This practical, hands-on book includes numerous examples that demonstrate common tasks such as authenticating users, constructing a shopping cart, generating PDF documents and images dynamically, sending and managing email, facilitating user discussions, connecting to Web services using XML, and developing Web 2.0 applications with Ajax-based interactivity. The fourth edition of “PHP and MySQL Web Development” has been thoroughly updated, revised, and expanded to cover developments in PHP 5 through version 5.3, such as namespaces and closures, as well as features introduced in MySQL 5.1. About the Author Lead Authors Laura Thomson is a senior software engineer at Mozilla Corporation. She was formerly a principal at both OmniTI and Tangled Web Design, and she has worked for RMIT University and the Boston Consulting Group. She holds a Bachelor of Applied Science (Computer Science) degree and a Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Systems Engineering) degree with honors. Luke Welling is a web architect at OmniTI and regularly speaks on open source and web development topics at conferences such as OSCON, ZendCon, MySQLUC, PHPCon, OSDC, and LinuxTag. Prior to joining OmniTI, he worked for the web analytics company Hitwise.com, at the database vendor MySQL AB, and as an independent consultant at Tangled Web Design. He has taught computer science at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, and holds a Bachelor of Applied Science (Computer Science) degree. Contributing Authors Julie C. Meloni has been developing web-based applications since the Web first saw the light of day and remembers the excitement surrounding the first GUI web browser. She has authored numerous books and articles on web-based programming languages and database topics, including the bestselling Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache All in One. Adam DeFields is a consultant specializing in web application development, project management, and instructional design. He lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he runs Emanation Systems, LLC, a company he founded in 2002. He has been involved with web development projects using several different technologies, but has developed a strong preference toward PHP/MySQL-based projects. Marc Wandschneider is a freelance software developer, author, and speaker who travels the globe working on interesting projects. In recent years, a lot of his attention has been focused on writing robust and scalable web applications, and in 2005 he wrote a book called Core Web Application Programming with PHP and MySQL. He was was previously the main developer of the SWiK open source community site. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Introduction IntroductionWelcome to PHP and MySQL Web Development. Within its pages, you will find distilled knowledge from our experiences using PHP and MySQL, two of the hottest web development tools around.In this introduction, we coverWhy you should read this bookWhat you will be able to achieve using this bookWhat PHP and MySQL are and why they’re greatWhat’s changed in the latest versions of PHP and MySQLHow this book is organizedLet’s get started.Why You Should Read This BookThis book will teach you how to create interactive websites from the simplest order form through to complex, secure e-commerce sites or interactive Web 2.0 sites. What’s more, you’ll learn how to do it using open source technologies.This book is aimed at readers who already know at least the basics of HTML and have done some programming in a modern programming language before but have not necessarily programmed for the Internet or used a relational database. If you are a beginning programmer, you should still find this book useful, but digesting it might take a little longer. We’ve tried not to leave out any basic concepts, but we do cover them at speed. The typical readers of this book want to master PHP and MySQL for the purpose of building a large or commercial website. You might already be working in another web development language; if so, this book should get you up to speed quickly.We wrote the first edition of this book because we were tired of finding PHP books that were basically function references. These books are useful, but they don’t help when your boss or client has said, “Go build me a shopping cart.” In this book, we have done our best to make every example useful. You can use many of the code samples directly in your website, and you can use many others with only minor modifications.What You Will Learn from This BookReading this book will enable you to build real-world, dynamic websites. If you’ve built websites using plain HTML, you realize the limitations of this approach. Static content from a pure HTML website is just that—static. It stays the same unless you physically update it. Your users can’t interact with the site in any meaningful fashion.Using a language such as PHP and a database such as MySQL allows you to make your sites dynamic: to have them be customizable and contain real-time information.We have deliberately focused this book on real-world applications, even in the introductory chapters. We begin by looking at a simple online ordering system and work our way through the various parts of PHP and MySQL.We then discuss aspects of electronic commerce and security as they relate to building a real-world website and show you how to implement these aspects in PHP and MySQL.In the final part of this book, we describe how to approach real-world projects and take you through the design, planning, and building of the following projects:User authentication and personalizationShopping cartsWeb-based emailMailing list managersWeb forumsPDF document generationWeb services with XML and SOAPWeb 2.0 application with AjaxYou should be able to use any of these projects as is, or you can modify them to suit your needs. We chose them because we believe they represent some the most common web-based applications built by programmers. If your needs are different, this book should help you along the way to achieving your goals.What Is PHP?PHP is a server-side scripting language designed specifically for the Web. Within an HTML page, you can embed PHP code that will be executed each time the page is visited. Your PHP code is interpreted at the web server and generates HTML or other output that the visitor will see.PHP was conceived in 1994 and was originally the work of one man, Rasmus Lerdorf. It was adopted by other talented people and has gone through four major rewrites to bring us the broad, mature product we see today. As of November 2007, it was installed on more than 21 million domains worldwide, and this number is growing rapidly. You can see the current number at http://www.php.net/usage.php.PHP is an Open Source project, which means you have access to the source code and can use, alter, and redistribute it all without charge.PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page but was changed in line with the GNU recursive naming convention (GNU = Gnu’s Not Unix) and now stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.The current major version of PHP is 5. This version saw a complete rewrite of the underlying Zend engine and some major improvements to the language.The home page for PHP is available at http://www.php.net.The home page for Zend Technologies is http://www.zend.com.What Is MySQL?MySQL (pronounced My-Ess-Que-Ell) is a very fast, robust, relational database management system (RDBMS). A database enables you to efficiently store, search, sort, and retrieve data. The MySQL server controls access to your data to ensure that multiple users can work with it concurrently, to provide fast access to it, and to ensure that only authorized users can obtain access. Hence, MySQL is a multiuser, multithreaded server. It uses Structured Query Language (SQL), the standard database query language. MySQL has been publicly available since 1996 but has a development history going back to 1979. It is the world’s most popular open source database and has won the Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Award on a number of occasions.MySQL is available under a dual licensing scheme. You can use it under an open source license (the GPL) free as long as you are willing to meet the terms of that license. If you want to distribute a non-GPL application including MySQL, you can buy a commercial license instead.Why Use PHP and MySQL?When setting out to build a website, you could use many different products.You need to choose the following:Hardware for the web serverAn operating systemWeb server softwareA database management systemA programming or scripting languageSome of these choices are dependent on the others. For example, not all operating systems run on all hardware, not all web servers support all programming languages, and so on.In this book, we do not pay much attention to hardware, operating systems, or web server software. We don’t need to. One of the best features of both PHP and MySQL is that they work with any major operating system and many of the minor ones.The majority of PHP code can be written to be portable between operating systems and web servers. There are some PHP functions that specifically relate to the filesystem that are operating system dependent, but these are clearly marked as such in the manual and in this book. Whatever hardware, operating system, and web server you choose, we believe you should seriously consider using PHP and MySQL.Some of PHP’s StrengthsSome of PHP’s main competitors are Perl, Microsoft ASP.NET, Ruby (on Rails or otherwise), JavaServer Pages (JSP), and ColdFusion.In comparison to these products, PHP has many strengths, including the following:PerformanceScalabilityInterfaces to many different database systemsBuilt-in libraries for many common web tasksLow costEase of learning and useStrong object-oriented supportPortabilityFlexibility of development approachAvailability of source codeAvailability of support and documentationA more detailed discussion of these strengths follows.PerformancePHP is very fast. Using a single inexpensive server, you can serve millions of hits per day. Benchmarks published by Zend Technologies (http://www.zend.com) show PHP outperforming its competition.ScalabilityPHP has what Rasmus Lerdorf frequently refers to as a “shared-nothing” architecture. This means that you can effectively and cheaply implement horizontal scaling with large numbers of commodity servers. Database IntegrationPHP has native connections available to many database systems. In addition to MySQL, you can directly connect to PostgreSQL, Oracle, dbm, FilePro, DB2, Hyperwave, Informix, InterBase, and Sybase databases, among others. PHP 5 also has a built-in SQL interface to a flat file, called SQLite.Using the Open Database Connectivity Standard (ODBC), you can connect to any database that provides an ODBC driver. This includes Microsoft products and many others.In addition to native libraries, PHP comes with a database access abstraction layer called PHP Database Objects (PDO), which allows consistent access and promotes secure coding practices.Built-in LibrariesBecause PHP was designed for use on the Web, it has many built-in functions for performing many useful web-related tasks. You can generate images on the fly, connect to web services and other network services, parse XML, send email, work with cookies, and generate PDF documents, all with just a few lines of code.CostPHP is free. You can download the latest version at any time from http://www.php.net for no charge.Ease of Learning PHPThe syntax of PHP is based on other programming languages, primarily C and Perl. If you already know C or Perl, or a C-like language such as C++ or Java, you will be productive using PHP almost immediately.Object-Oriented SupportPHP version 5 has well-designed object-oriented features. If you learned to program in Java or C++, you will find the features (and generally the syntax) that you expect, such as inheritance, private and protected attributes and methods, abstract classes and methods, interfaces, constructors, and destructors. You will even find some less common features such as iterators. Some of this functionality was available in PHP versions 3 and 4, but the object-oriented support in version 5 is much more complete.PortabilityPHP is available for many different operating systems. You can write PHP code on free Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD, commercial Unix versions such as Solaris and IRIX, OS X, or on different versions of Microsoft Windows.Well-written code will usually work without modification on a different system running PHP.Flexibility of Development ApproachPHP allows you to implement simple tasks simply, and equally easily adapts to implementing large applications using a framework based on design patterns such as Model–View–Controller (MVC).Source CodeYou have access to PHP’s source code. With PHP, unlike commercial, closed-source products, if you want to modify something or add to the language, you are free to do so.You do not need to wait for the manufacturer to release patches. You also don’t need to worry about the manufacturer going out of business or deciding to stop supporting a product.Availability of Support and DocumentationZend Technologies (http://www.zend.com), the company behind the engine that powers PHP, funds its PHP development by offering support and related software on a commercial basis.The PHP documentation and community are mature and rich resources with a wealth of information to share.What Is New in PHP 5?You may have recently moved to PHP 5 from one of the PHP 4.x versions. As you would expect in a new major version, it has some significant changes. The Zend engine beneath PHP has been rewritten for this version. Major new features are as follows:Better object-oriented support built around a completely new object model (see Chapter 6, “Object-Oriented PHP”)Exceptions for scalable, maintainable error handling (see Chapter 7, “Error and Exception Handling”)SimpleXML for easy handling of XML data (see Chapter 33, “Connecting to Web Services with XML and SOAP”)Other changes include moving some extensions out of the default PHP install and into the PECL library, improving streams support, and adding SQLite.At the time of writing, PHP 5.2 was the current version, with PHP 5.3 on the near horizon. PHP 5.2 added a number of useful features including:The new input filtering extension for security purposesJSON extension for better JavaScript interoperabilityFile upload progress trackingBetter date and time handlingMany upgraded client libraries, performance improvements (including better memory management in the Zend Engine), and bug fixesKey Features of PHP 5.3You may have heard about a new major release of PHP, called PHP 6. At the time of this writing, PHP 6 is not in the release candidate stage, and hosting providers won’t be installing it for mass use for quite some time. However, some of the key features planned in PHP 6 have been back-ported to PHP 5.3, which is a minor version release and closer to passing acceptance testing and thus installation by hosting providers (of course, if you are your own server’s administrator, you can install any version you like). Some of the new features in PHP 5.3 are listed below; additional information also appears throughout this book as appropriate:The addition of namespaces; for more information see http://www.php.net/language.namespaces The addition of the intl extension for application internationalization; for more information see http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.intl.php The addition of the phar extension for creating self-contained PHP application archives; for more information see http://www.php.net/book.phar The addition of the fileinfo extension for enhanced ability to work with files; for more information see http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.fileinfo.php The addition of the sqlite3 extension for working with the SQLite Embeddable SQL Database Engine; for more information see http://www.php.net/manual/en/class.sqlite3.php The inclusion of support for the MySQLnd driver, a replacement for libmysql; for more information see http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/PHP_MYSQLND While the list above contains some of the highly-touted features of PHP 5.3, the release also includes a significant number of bug fixes and maintenance performed on existing functionality, such as:Removing support for any version of Windows older than Windows 2000 (such as Windows 98 and NT4)Ensuring the PCRE, Reflection, and SPL extensions are always enabledAdding a few date and time functions for ease of date calculation and manipulationImproving the crypt(), hash(), and md5() functionality, as well as improving the OpenSSL extensionImproving php.ini administration and handling, including better error reportingContinuing to fine-tune the Zend engine for better PHP runtime speed and memory usageSome of MySQLs StrengthsMySQLs main competitors are PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle.MySQL has many strengths, including the following:High performanceLow costEase of configuration and learningPortabilityAvailability of source codeAvailability of supportA more detailed discussion of these strengths follows.PerformanceMySQL is undeniably fast. You can see the developers’ benchmark page at http://web.mysql.com/whymysql/benchmarks. Many of these benchmarks show MySQL to be orders of magnitude faster than the competition. In 2002, eWeek published a benchmark comparing five databases powering a web application. The best result was a tie between MySQL and the much more expensive Oracle.Low CostMySQL is available at no cost under an open source license or at low cost under a commercial license. You need a license if you want to redistribute MySQL as part of an application and do not want to license your application under an Open Source license. If you do not intend to distribute your application—typical for most web applications, or are working on free or open source Software, you do not need to buy a license.Ease of UseMost modern databases use SQL. If you have used another RDBMS, you should have no trouble adapting to this one. MySQL is also easier to set up than many similar products.PortabilityMySQL can be used on many different Unix systems as well as under Microsoft Windows.Source CodeAs with PHP, you can obtain and modify the source code for MySQL. This point is not important to most users most of the time, but it provides you with excellent peace of mind, ensuring future continuity and giving you options in an emergency.Availability of SupportNot all open source products have a parent company offering support, training, consulting, and certification, but you can get all of these benefits from MySQL AB (http://www.mysql.com).What Is New in MySQL 5?Major changes introduced for MySQL 5 includeViewsStored procedures (see Chapter 13, “Advanced MySQL Programming”)Basic trigger supportCursor supportOther changes include more ANSI standard compliance and speed improvements.If you are still using an early 4.x version or a 3.x version of the MySQL server, you should know that the following features were added to various versions from 4.0:Subquery supportGIS types for storing geographical dataImproved support for internationalizationThe transaction-safe storage engine InnoDB included as standardThe MySQL query cache, which greatly improves the speed of repetitive queries as often run by web applicationsThis book was written using MySQL 5.1 (Beta Community Edition). This version also added support forPartitioningRow based replication Event schedulingLogging to tablesImprovements to MySQL Cluster, information schema, backup processes, and many bug fixesHow Is This Book Organized?This book is divided into five main parts:Part I, “Using PHP,” provides an overview of the main parts of the PHP language with examples. Each example is a real-world example used in building an e-commerce site rather than “toy” code. We kick off this section with Chapter 1, “PHP Crash Course.” If you’ve already used PHP, you can whiz through this chapter. If you are new to PHP or new to programming, you might want to spend a little more time on it. Even if you are quite familiar with PHP but you are new to PHP 5, you will want to read Chapter 6, “Object-Oriented PHP,” because the object-oriented functionality has changed significantly.Part II, “Using MySQL,” discusses the concepts and design involved in using relational database systems such as MySQL, using SQL, connecting your MySQL database to the world with PHP, and advanced MySQL topics, such as security and optimization.Part III, “E-commerce and Security,” covers some of the general issues involved in developing a website using any language. The most important of these issues is security. We then discuss how you can use PHP and MySQL to authenticate your users and securely gather, transmit, and store data.Part IV, “Advanced PHP Techniques,” offers detailed coverage of some of the major built-in functions in PHP. We have selected groups of functions that are likely to be useful when building a website. You will learn about interaction with the server, interaction with the network, image generation, date and time manipulation, and session variables.Part V, “Building Practical PHP and MySQL Projects,” is our favorite section. It deals with practical real-world issues such as managing large projects and debugging, and provides sample projects that demonstrate the power and versatility of PHP and MySQL.FinallyWe hope you enjoy this book and enjoy learning about PHP and MySQL as much as we did when we first began using these products. They are really a pleasure to use. Soon, you’ll be able to join the many thousands of web developers who use these robust, powerful tools to easily build dynamic, real-time websites. © Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Pro – cover a lot of materialCon – topics are explain vaguely with little examples.The author try to cram in too many topics, but he doesn’t go into detail on any, so you left not understanding the material clearly and can’t use the book as reference. The books talks about security, but the code are written unsecurely. I suggest reading https://www.amazon.com/PHP-MySQL-Dynamic-Web-Sites/dp/0321784073/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1495143766&sr=8-3&keywords=larry+ullman, though Larry doesn’t cover as many topics as Luke, Larry does a better job at explaining the important concept with code example to help you understand the concept.

⭐After searching for basic primers on PHP and MySQL, I settled on this book due to the many positive reviews. I’m glad that I did, as I now have a basic understanding of how to use these two technologies to build a web site.Make no mistake, unless you have previous experience, this book is only a beginning. I can tell that it will take many more hours of work before I am able to implement these concepts. However, I can now look at existing code and understand what it is doing “behind the scenes.” I also feel confident that I could modify existing code to meet my needs.A few notes.First, you CAN download the CD content. Just go to […], set up a free account, register your book, and download the content.Second, there are mistakes sprinkled throughout the text that have not been corrected in the errata. You will need to do some basic troubleshooting to get some of the scripts to work, but it’s nothing drastic.Finally, this book is written for PHP 5.2. If you have 5.3, there is one specific function the author uses that is deprecated. When you get to this section, it will be quite obvious, because you will get an error to that effect. It took an additional fifteen minutes of research for me to find and implement the updated function.My only complaint is that, after the “PHP Crash Course” at the beginning, there are fewer coding examples throughout the book. I would rather type up many smaller scripts and test out each concept throughout the chapter rather than one or two longer scripts at the end.I’m only 2/3 of the way through the book, but I believe this was a worthwhile purchase, and I will definitely look for titles by this author again.

⭐It’s a bit comical when I agree with the reviewers listed inside the cover of the book … “I picked up this book 2 days ago and can’t put it down” and “layout and flow is perfect,” etc.I tried PHP for Dummies and I was too dumb. I tried Sam’s, but he failed me this time. Finally, I found this book. I consumed this book as I do many tech books first on kindle, using the text to speech method to listen to it. Then I purchased a hard copy so I could follow the code. In this case, the hard copy of the book also has a great CD-ROM that I was able to use to install Apache and MySQL on my computer. I’ve failed so far to get the PHP up and running, but I’m not sure it matters since I just put the code on my website and it runs from there.I would recommend on future editions, the authors move up to the front a little teaser. It teaches how to use PHP to shuffle photos. Its a super simple set of code and it is currently located in a completely rational location, explaining how to reorder arrays. The only reason I would recommend a teaser upfront is that the reader, immediately upon opening the book could go to a website and immediately post some PHP code on the web. In the instant world of the 21st century, this small mod would sink the hook a little further on this book.Regardless of minor adjustments to make the book more enticing, its the best I’ve seen yet. It’s clear, linear and easy to follow. As the reviewers in the book state, it has a natural flow … its intuitive. What more could one ask for in a tech text?Well done!

⭐I got this book to get a quick intro to PHP. I’m glad to say that this book was very thorough and touched on a lot of subjects from basic language data structures to more complex topics such as file manipulation, email, and MySql database connectivity. This book is about 900 pages long and contains examples that illustrate the topics. It was perfect for me. I learn by seeing/doing and the CD-ROM the book comes with is loaded with the samples/examples that are in the book. So you can quickly copy/paste into your new project. I have over 15yrs of software development in various technologies and I found this very helpful.

⭐A very large but informative book. This helped me greatly when doing my degree in learning these languages. Skills have developed a lot since and this started me on the way.Would recommend this to anyone looking to learn

⭐I’ve only really skimmed through the book so far, but already I feel this is the best book I could have gone for as someone who has dabbled in PHP but would like to understand better and code better. It gives lots of information on the background of PHP without going on too much about it and the examples feel more useful than most examples I come across in coding books.Small niggles – the formatting in the kindle version is not great. Bullet points display as an “n” but while annoying you can ignore. I suspect the paperback version is better but I don’t like cluttering up the bookcase with books that will be out of date in a few years, which is the case with most tech books.It’s also a bit confusing when it refers to the CD – since obviously there is no CD with the Kindle version – for those as confused as I was, you need to go to “informit.com” and create an account (I’m not sure if you need to use your amazon email to signup for this to work but that’s the one I used). Once you have created an account and are logged in search for the book. Just under the description and share icons is a link “register your product” click on that. It auto filled the form for me and then I clicked “submit”. You will then have a link to “Access Bonus Content” this has a zip file with all the source code from the examples within.

⭐I’d got past beginner level with PHP, and I was looking for a book to take me further. This is definitely it. It covers PHP basics very quickly and efficiently – great as a refresher, but I’m not sure how helpful it would be for a novice. Probably not a problem if you’re familiar with JavaScript etc. The style is clean and comprehendible, the exercise files are easy to find and download (this can be a problem with other books).It’s very thick, and the text is quite small – I wound up buying the Kindle version, too, for portability and legibility. Still, in the morass of PHP books out there, this one delivers the goods.

⭐I have just bought the 4th edition after using the 1st edition for years. I referred to the old book at least a couple of times a week and the new one is even better; bringing it up to date with PHP 5.3 and MySQL 5.1 but also adding more detail about things like security and AJAX. The new book is 100 pages bigger than the 1st edition.For me this book is perfect, I’m an experienced programmer but not a PHP guru and I find the level about right. I mostly look up PHP functions etc online but if I need an explanation about where and why I might use this function I go to the book.If you are not a total beginner and want one good PHP book I would recommend this one.

⭐Very pleased with the book the only thing it arrived a bit late with respect to the arrival day. Overall worth buying it. I strongly recommend it to all CMS designers and Joomla web developers.

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