Beginning PHP and MySQL

Given that I purchased this book back in June of 2009, this book review is definitely well overdue, and quite frankly the main reason why I even bothered writing a review for this book is because I’m tossing it away (due to limited space in by bookshelf!). In total, I’ve read about 80% percent of the total content of this book, which I think it should be sufficient to write a fair and honest review.

At 1080 pages, Beginning PHP and MySQL 3rd Edition is a massive book that originally took me several months to read. To be fair, I read the bulk of this book shortly after I bought it and not seven years later since I purchased this book. The main reason why I didn’t originally wrote a review for it was because at the time I didn’t completely finished the MySQL portion of the book until now. That is, in order for me to write a book, I have to read the book from cover to cover.

Excuses aside, as mentioned in the title, this book focuses on teaching the reader how to use both PHP and MySQL. This is a fantastic book that I have to give a lot of credit on teaching me how to program in PHP! This book starts with the basic fundamentals of programming and progresses into much more advance topics and PHP programming techniques. Anyone completely new to programming or just new to PHP can pick up this book (or newer editions of it) and learn something new about the language. You’ll learn basic programming concepts like variables, data types, functions, advanced topics like object-oriented programming in PHP (PHP 5.x era), and database design and programming.

This was and perhaps still is an awesome book reference for anyone wanting to acquire knowledgeable in backend PHP development. This book covers MySQL beautifully, with easy and simple examples. It provides the core concepts of relational databases and design, however given the complexity of MySQL, it does not teach you advance MySQL administration techniques and tips. Mainly since this book is primarily aimed for Web developers and not database administrators. Thus said, this book does cover and extensive amount of MySQL usage information that anyone from a beginner to a senior developer can benefit from.

The stuff that I didn’t read was the content regarding topics I wasn’t to interested in learning like LDAP, SQLite, PHP MVC Zend Framework. Thus said, overall it’s amazing how much stuff this book covers!

For obvious reasons, a small portion of this book covers what are now considered to be deprecated PHP 5. I enjoyed this book so much that I’m going to definitely purchase (e-book) the new PHP 7 Beginning PHP and MySQL 5th Edition, which is set to be released later this year.

Rating: 4/5

Beginning PHP and MySQL

• Chapter 1: Introduction to PHP
• Chapter 2: Configuring Your Environment
• Chapter 3: PHP Basics
• Chapter 4: Functions
• Chapter 5: Arrays
• Chapter 6: Object-Oriented PHP
• Chapter 7: Advanced OOP Features
• Chapter 8: Error and Exception Handling
• Chapter 9: Strings and Regular Expressions
• Chapter 10: Working with the File and Operating System
• Chapter 11: PEAR
• Chapter 12: Date and Time
• Chapter 13: Forms
• Chapter 14: Authenticating Your Users
• Chapter 15: Handling File Uploads
• Chapter 16: Networking
• Chapter 17: PHP and LDAP
• Chapter 18: Session Handlers
• Chapter 19: Templating with Smarty
• Chapter 20: Web Services
• Chapter 21: Secure PHP Programming
• Chapter 22: SQLite
• Chapter 23: Building Websites for the World
• Chapter 24: MVC and the Zend Framework
• Chapter 25: Introducing MySQL
• Chapter 26: Installing and Configuring MySQL
• Chapter 27: The Many MySQL Clients
• Chapter 28: MySQL Storage Engines and Datatypes
• Chapter 29: Securing MySQL
• Chapter 30: Using PHP with MySQL
• Chapter 31: Introducing PDO
• Chapter 32: Stored Routines
• Chapter 33: MySQL Triggers
• Chapter 34: MySQL Views
• Chapter 35: Practical Database Queries
• Chapter 36: Indexes and Searching
• Chapter 37: Transactions
• Chapter 38: Importing and Exporting Data

Tags: [ php mysql ]

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