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PHP and MySQL for Dummies with CDROM
Book Details
Availability: Usually ships within 24 hoursList Price: $24.99
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Spotlight Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 3.13Customer Rating: 4
Summary: Great book for beginners
Comment: This is a great book for someone learning to use PHP and MySQL. It assumes the reader already knows basic HTML. The book is easy to read and understand. The topics it covers gives the reader a good grounding of the basics, enough to create a reasonably sophisticated web application. The stuff it leaves out is not essential to know, and can be left for when the reader steps up to more complicated applications.
Information is well organised and easy to navigate. The two web application examples towards the back of the book are also excellent to learn from. They're very good at demonstrating techniques described in earlier chapters.
One potential difficulty someone might have is with the explanation of relational database design. Someone without any past knowledge of relational databases might find the book's explanation a bit light. Designing relational databases isn't terribly complicated, but has its tricky bits.
Another thing I liked about this book is how it helped me set up the appropriate software on my computer so it all worked cleanly together.
Customer Rating: 3
Summary: Starts good and gets lost in the middle
Comment: Had I written this review whilst reading the first chapters of the book I would have given it 5 stars. The steps how to install MySQL and the PHP installation went very smoothly following the book. I even found setup tips for MySQL that I had previously search for on the web/forums without results. I found I was leaning PHP & MySQL very quickly.
The middle of the book has more general info using various examples, but nothing really useful to tryout. The book gets up to speed in chapter 11. I felt I was leaning something again. Learn you must, you need to know what you're doing so you can correct the mistakes in code. Chapter 12, even more mistakes. This time I took the lazy way and downloaded the corrected code from the author's site only to find it was still incorrect. Maybe the mistakes in the code have actually helped, whilst solving the errors I have found lots of useful info for PHP & MySQL.
My roundup:
The start of the book is good for a PHP beginner, with useful setup info. It's weak in the middle. The last part, the main reason to buy the book tends to go too quickly not explaining details that would help a beginner.
It's a shame the book's wasn't checked a little better.
Customer Rating: 1
Summary: More problems with the E-book/Digital Version
Comment: Do NOT order a digital book from Amazon like this one. I was attracted to the possibility of starting my reading immediately. Indeed, the e-products are marketed in this fashion. However, when I purchased this book, I was not taken immediately to a download page (as is the case with most digital downloads offered by other companies)--I was told I had to wait for a confirmation email. However, when that email arrived a good number of minutes later, it contained no link or instructions for downloading. When I used the Internet to find a telephone number (because Amazon lists none on its website) and called, the kind representative indicated that she could not help me because the e-book department was responsible for such matters--not customer service. She would forward my concerns to them for a response. When I asked how long it would take, she said 1-2 business days. Needless to say, I could have had the hard-copy of the book by then.