World Famous Comics: Practical PHP and MySQL(R): Building Eight Dynamic Web Applications (Negus Software Solutions Series)
Practical PHP and MySQL(R): Building Eight Dynamic Web Applications (Negus Software Solutions Series)
By: Jono Bacon Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Prentice Hall PTR Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 528 Publication Date: November 24, 2006
"Practical PHP and MySQL reflects Jono's commitment to the spirit of making open source subjects accessible to everyone. The book carefully walks you through the code for eight useful, dynamic Web applications. Projects are presented in a playful way, like the forum project that touts horror movies that make you 'hide behind the couch.'" -From the Foreword by Christopher Negus, Series Editor, Negus Live Linux Series
Build Dynamic Web Sites Fast, with PHP and MySQL...
Learn from Eight Ready-to-Run Applications!
Suddenly, it’s easy to build commercial-quality Web applications using free and open source software. With this book, you’ll learn from eight ready-to-run, real-world applications—all backed by clear diagrams and screenshots, well-documented code, and simple, practical explanations.
Leading open source author Jono Bacon teaches the core skills you’ll need to build virtually any application. You’ll discover how to connect with databases, upload content, perform cascading deletes, edit records, validate registrations, specify user security, create reusable components, use PEAR extensions, and even build Ajax applications.
Working from complete examples on the CD-ROM, you’ll create
Generic dynamic Web sites
Blogs
Discussion forums
Shopping carts
Auction sites
Calendars
FAQ systems
Reusable components
Content management systems
News sites
JONO BACON is Ubuntu community manager for Canonical, Ubuntu’s sponsor. He is an established speaker, author, and contributor to the open source community. Bacon co-authored Linux Desktop Hacks and The Official Ubuntu Book; has served as a columnist for Linux Format, Linux User & Developer, and PC Plus; and is an O’Reilly Networkweblog author. He is a lead developer onthe Jokosher (www.jokosher.org) project,and co-founder of LUGRadio—a podcastwith more than 15,000 listeners, andan annual event that attracts visitorsfrom around the world.
CD-ROM Includes
XAMPP for Linux: easy-to-install, preconfigured Apache distributions containing MySQL, PHP, Perl, and more
Source code for all eight fully-working applications discussed in the book
A remastered Ubuntu live CD, set to run all eight applications live
System Requirements
CPU: Pentium III, 650 MHz. RAM: 256MB (recommended 512MB).
Hard disk: No space required to run live CD; 250MB of space needed to put XAMPP server and projects on installed system.
Full of Errors Don't waste your time with this book, there are to many errors in the code. This one's heading to the burn pile.
I've read it letter by letter The samples are good, the mySQL stuff not so explained -- however the book has ALOT of grammar error! The code has bugs and some code does not even work -- for example missing curly braces in the book's code -- i've had to debug myself.
Do not buy this book! I cannot stress the fact on how much this book needs editing. I am an intermediate php programmer. I thought that this book would help me build "eight dynamic web applications" without so many errors. I bought the book with the intention to learn, not to help make corrections for the author. You cannot even get through the first application ("Chapter 4: Building a Weblog") example without encountering substantial typos. When going through the examples, I feel like i am back-tracking trying to figure out whether if I typed something wrong or if its the book that printed the material wrong.
I'm actually looking on Amazon to buy another book with better reviews. I wish i looked at the reviews for this book before i bought it, I would have saved me some money.
Tech Editor Desperately Needed Wait for the 2nd edition. If the book had gone through a thorough tech editing (type in and run the code!) before going to the presses, this might have been a 4-star book.
If you are the type of person that can learn by just looking at code and getting a broad sense of how it works, then there might still be some useful information in here for you. I learn by doing, which made typing in the buggy examples a frustrating experience. While I also learned some by debugging this book, but that is not the experience I paid for. There is no online errata for this book that I am able to find.
If you just want view code without typing it in, the "Live CD" might be of use to you. The code on the CD is apparently a more debugged version of the code shown in the text of the book. The concept of booting up into Linux on a CD to do your own coding PHP and MySQL is not as useful as the publisher makes it out to be, because there is no way to easily save anything you do there.
I started to do my own tech editing of the book around page 40. Here are examples of some of the types of errors you can expect: Page 42: Database name incorrectly referred to as "perfectproducts." Should be "productsdb." Page 43: Database column name incorrectly referred to as "if." Should be "id." Page 45: Missing steps in instructions for setting up database connection. Reader needs to set up user permissions in phpMyAdmin, and also edit code to include the new user information. Page 68: Table 4-2 column header should be "BLOG_ID" instead of "CAT_ID." Page 77-78: The sample code will output invalid HTML unless you move around where it writes out the opening and closing paragraph tags. Page 81: The sample code will output invalid HTML unless you move around where it writes out the closing UL tag. Page 99: Missing the required opening and closing PHP tags around the code that includes the footer PHP file. Page 100: Last paragraph should refer to adding code under the "home" link instead of the "categories" link. Instructions say to add the code inside the PHP block, but the non-bolded text above the PHP block needs to be added as well.
Those were freebies. Prentice Hall, the "world's leading educational publisher" should foot the bill to edit the rest.
Promising to be GOOD This book promises to be good. The delivery was very quick and I am looking forward to an exciting study sessions.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
