PHP and MySQL Web Development: A Beginner’s Guide 1st Edition

Phenomenal author. Excellent resource.

Easy to understand and appropriate for a beginner's guide. It cleared up a number of questions that I had

Good info

Great book for beginners.

The appropriate book for a beginner. If you want to take advantage of technologies like HTML, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL for website development and you do not have any experience with web development in PHP, this book is for you.Of course, it is too basic for someone with experience, but it is clear and correct targeted: "It is a beginner's guide".I really would like the book to finish with some kind of roadmap about the next steps in order to continue learning about those Development Technologies.

Most of the information was solid, but there were many technical issues involving broken code. Trying to download the code samples was an exercise in futility as well, since the URL provided for download did not have them there.

1. Even though the book is called PHP and MySQL Web Development and has over half a K sites approximately 2/5 is either useless or dedicated to review HTML, CSS and JS. There are better, dedicated books for that. Exercises are good but you will not find the correct solutions for them in the book. There are online, hard to find and not in really ecstatic format.2. If you make it through or just skip the parts you already know, you will be encountered by tedious description how to install Zend Studio on your Windows machine. I think this is meant to narrow ( like: "sell your mac and delete your text editor"). Just saying this sounds too bias.3. If you make it through and skip the parts that are useful to you, you are on page 197.Now 1-5 is insufficiently to sufficiently explainedPHP syntax 4,PHP functions = 3,PHP user defined functions = 1,PHP loops = 2,PHP File and directory management = 4,PHP Superglobals =4,PHPArrays = 5,PHP Forms = 5Page 307 - MySQL40 pages of PHPmyAdmin and MySQL WorkBench. Why both? Whatever. Lots of pictures, nicely explained MySQL syntax, commands and so on. Too much explained if you planning to use MySQL with PHP. But thats ok. I would say NICE.Page 405 till 425. PHP and MySQL together explainedThe most interesting part for me and it has only 20 pages :(.Page 426 - ENDExamples that are tedious to write and lack a diversity. Page after page of the same bullshit. So you decide to build the website according to the code in the book. Page after page. And then after nice few hours of coding you read on page 477 that the next page you need for your full site has few little changes and different script is called on the end and it is not even worth listing. WTF? So I did not finished the code copying, luckily I have to say as when I went angry through the rest of the book I realised that there are not many new things there.Summary:The book is awful waste of space! max 200 pages of useful information. Thats why 2 from 5 stars.