By Karen Morrill-McClure

Where to start in a review of a book that’s over 900 pages long? Hard to say.

Maybe I should start with what I was looking for. I’m not a complete beginner with PHP, I’ve been using it on my sites for several years now and I’m starting to write more complicated web applications using both PHP and MySQL. I’ve mostly used online resources to learn about PHP and MySQL. I have one old resource book, a 2001 PHP and MySQL Web Development manual from SAMS.

A couple of months ago, I started looking for a new PHP/MySQL manual for reference. I got tired of searching on the web every time I had a problem. I wanted everything in one place. Of course, it would be nice if that one place was a little more compact, but PHP and MySQL are mature and complicated themselves, so any book about them will be long.

After a little searching, I found Beginning PHP and MySQL. The tag line is ‘from novice to professional.’ Since I consider myself somewhere in between those two extremes, it sounded good to me.

First off, this is not a book that I recommend you curl up with in front of the fire for a nice evening of reading. I love manuals, but even this one got a little obtuse for me at times. Just when I was beginning to despair, I had to look something up for a project. I can never remember how to code checkboxes so that I can get all the results that have been checked in the HTML form. Beginning PHP and MySQL to the rescue, not only was the index easy to use, the section on forms was concise and easy to understand.

Reading on through book, I learned a bit more about dealing with dates and times in PHP. I coded a scheduling application for a triathlon training group, it might have been a little easier with this information. Next time I’m working on a calendar or schedule, I’ll definitely pick this book up and read this section again.

The author is knowledgeable, not only about PHP and MySQL, but about how they are often used. I like that he said that most PHP programmers don’t have the date function memorized, they have to look up the options. Whew, that made me feel better, since I had to look it up every time I used it.

It’s hard to gauge how useful this book would be to a true beginner, but we all have to start somewhere. It’s certainly proving to be a valuable resource to someone who already knows the language fairly well and wants to take it to the next level.

I’d recommend it to anyone looking for an overview of PHP and MySQL. It may not delve specifically into some of the ecommerce features, but I’ve found that manuals that have a very specific focus usually aren’t doing exactly what I want to do. The beauty of PHP is that I can build anything I want with it. I don’t want to make a travel reservation system, but I do need to know how to use built in functions and how to manipulate strings to create what I want to create. This book helps me do just that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Book Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.