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How to Do Everything with PHP and MySQL
The publisher has a page on their Web site devoted to the book; for some reason, it lists the book as containing 400 pages, but my copy has 381. The page also has links to a table of contents and a sample chapter, namely the first one. For those readers with very slow Internet access or unstable Adobe Acrobat plug-ins installed, be aware that the sample chapter -- and even the table of contents -- are offered only as PDFs, but the two links give no warning.
Most technical publishers, for every one of their books, wisely have links to the errata and sample code, right there on each book's Web page. This is the best approach, because when readers are having difficulty getting a book's examples to work correctly, they want to be able to quickly find and download the most up-to-date sample code, as well as check the errata page for any bugs in the printed code. Unfortunately, McGraw-Hill/Osborne has their links to those two types of information in an easily-overlooked part of a menubar, using small black text on a blue background. The links are near the upper left-hand corner, and outside the content section of the Web page, where the typical reader would be seeking fruitlessly for them.
The companion Web site for the book is hosted by Vaswani's software consulting firm, Melonfire. The site has the book's table of contents (in HTML), a link to chapter 1 in PDF, a profile of the author, three full-length case studies, a feedback form, and an extensive collection of links to PHP and MySQL reference material, discussion lists, articles, and tutorials. At the end of the Introduction in the book, the author invites the reader to use that companion site for connecting with other PHP users, and sharing their thoughts on PHP and MySQL development. The site itself has no such forum, so the author probably meant the discussion lists.
The companion site also has a link to download a Zip file containing all of the sample applications from the book -- from chapters 7, 12, and 16 -- comprising nine PHP scripts, an SQL file, and a data file. The code snippets themselves do not appear to be included in the download. This shouldn't pose a difficulty for the typical reader, since few of the code snippets are long. Besides, typing them in on one's computer can help to reinforce the language syntax that one is learning, as well as decent code formatting (valuable for newbies).
The book is organized into four parts.The first of these presents the basics of PHP and MySQL, including the history and features of both technologies, as well as how to install them on Unix and Windows systems, verify the integrity of the installations, and make some critical security and configuration changes, such as changing passwords. Parts II and III cover the basics of PHP and MySQL, respectively. The fourth and final part describes how to use the two together. To that end, every chapter contains snippets of code to illustrate the ideas being described. In addition, each section is wrapped up and illustrated with a sample application. For PHP, the author shows how to build a session-based shopping cart. For MySQL, he presents a simple order-tracking system. For using PHP and MySQL together, he shows a news-publishing system.
Despite its title, the book clearly does not tell the reader how to do everything with PHP and MySQL. As the author notes in the Introduction, the book is not designed to be a complete reference for either technology, but instead intended as a tutorial for Web developers who are interested in learning how to do server-side scripting in combination with a database management system. Vaswani states that he does not assume prior knowledge of programming or database fundamentals, and that these basic concepts will be taught by example, using tutorials and realistic examples. I suspect a reader not familiar with HTML, however, could be easily baffled by the book. On the other hand, most if not all developers reading a book on PHP or MySQL are likely to already know HTML well enough to understand the output of PHP-enhanced Web pages.
One strength that this book has over many similar ones is that the author explains up front how to install PHP and MySQL, rather than relegating these topics to an appendix, or skipping them entirely. This is critical, because many programmers will find that the most challenging aspects of getting started with PHP and MySQL, are simply getting them installed and working, along with a Web server, such as Apache -- and not coding the applications themselves.
Another welcome aspect of the book is the author's enthusiasm for the technologies -- although characterizing MySQL as "quite friendly" (page 150) is a stretch. Furthermore, his explanations are clear and concise. In addition, Vaswani makes no pretense that his book has all the answers; he frequently refers the reader to URLs in the online manuals of the products, for more details. In addition, he does a nice job of illustrating the advantages of normalized database tables, and later explaining how to format query output -- an important topic omitted in many similar books.
Yet, like all books, this one is not perfect. There are a number of errors or pitfalls in the book that could confuse the reader. They range from incomplete explanations of what a user will see when running particular commands, to the sort of errata one finds in all technical books. I found over two dozen in total (there may be more). In the interests of keeping this Slashdot version of the book review close to the recommended length, I won't list all of the problems here, but will instead refer the reader to a longer version of this book review, if they are interested in those details.
Aside from its many minor flaws, I recommend this title to any programmer who wants to learn the basics of PHP and MySQL. Even though the publisher could improve their production quality, choice of binding, and Web page, the author has done a good job of clearly presenting the major points. Future editions could incorporate fixes to the errors noted in the longer version of this review, as well as better explain to the neophyte how to test/debug the code snippets. Nonetheless, the intended reader would be well served by this particular book.
Michael J. Ross is a freelance writer, computer consultant, and the editor of PristinePlanet.com's free newsletter. You can purchase How to Do Everything with PHP and MySQL from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
This is finally the book that I need to write my php/mysql based operating system. Linux and Microsoft are dead!
Step 1: Use Emacs as your text editor.
How different is what this book covers from what this, this, this, or this?
Dont buy a book about PHP AND MySQL.
Seriously, buy one for each one of them.
Then, when you've bought those two, you can stack them under your laptop and type in:
http://www.php.net/
http://mysql.com/doc/
Ready to go!
It's called "Why Not To Do Everything with PHP and MySQL". ;-)
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
The quote at the bottom of the Slashdot page says it all:
He flung himself on his horse and rode madly off in all directions.
1. No proper database connection pooling (and no, pconnect is not connection pooling).
2. Can't really run Apache2 in its threaded mode because a lot of php libraries are not thread safe (although php itself is).
Don't get me wrong, I *love* both php and mysql, but for highly-trafficked sites, jsp is definitely a better choice (from my own experience).
The Raven
Which is sad, because as much as PHP sucks, J2EE solutions suck just as badly in different ways. (That's another article.)
The combination of the two is rapidly emerging as a favorite, partly because they work well together
Didn't PHP / MySQL emerge as a favorite about 5 years ago? Isn't the pair now a fully emerged favorite? Did I dream the year 2000 or has the author been Rip Van Winkling?
ShoutingMan.com
PHP is a full programming language. You can do basically anything in PHP that you can do in Perl, Java, .NET, Ruby, etc.
Granted, PHP lends itself to sloppier code than some other languages. Or rather, it _allows_ you to write sloppy code. But this is only a disadvantage if the developer is unskilled/undisciplined. A skilled PHP programmer can write robust, object-oriented code that follows the same design patterns as Java. It's just that certain Java frameworks force every project to be heavyweight, while PHP allows you to do a lot of things simply. If you want to write yourself a simple photo gallery app, why bother with Struts?
I write this as an ex- (not current) PHP programmer. I recently made the switch to Ruby on Rails, which has proved to be fantastic thus far.
Never trust anyone who says "Language X is terrible and Language Y is great."
Seems like the only explanation for this myriad of redundant books on such a simple topic. Really, how can there be a market that can accomodate another one of these identical books every month?
sic transit gloria mundi
"How to Do Everything? with PHP and MySQL"?
I hate how people abuses of PHP. PHP is nice when you really need what things like PHP/ASP/etc provide, but these days some people use it for everything. I hate it. Take a look at blogs - they're not really "dynamic content", they're just static content which changes very frequently, still everybody uses PHP to implement them.
I can't stress strongly enough that people NOT buy a MySQL book. Buy a SQL book. Even better, buy a RDBMS book. We have enough people doing stupid things with data. We don't need any more. You might as well suggest that somebody buy a Windows 95 book.
I don't respond to AC's.
PHP websites are more vulnerable to worms. Just six months ago, many PHP run forums were shut down and destroyed. The exploit was something that worked only with PHP forums.
So it was a shortcoming endemic to the langauge, and not sloppy coding, right? I mean to say, PHP itself was at fault, due its very nature? A similar thing can't possibly happen in a "real" programming language like Java?
Java is the better language to learn. It is more like a true programming language than PHP. The reward for the time spent learning a language is greater with Java than with PHP.
That's begging the question. And wooly-headed thinking at its best. I'd argue that the barrier to entry is a lot lower with PHP than Java (or C, C++, .Net, et al.). So someone new to the language is bound to see results faster. But your point is nonsensical to begin with...
I always thought of PHP as more of a scripting langugae, and not a true language. No large PHP applications exists out there. But there are tons of enterprise Java applications.
A scripting language is a "true language". BASIC is a true programming langauge. MSDOS batch is a true programming langauge. Further, have you ever heard the saying "use the right tool for the job"? There are a lot of types of websites filling a lot of roles. Many (most?) of them don't need the overhead and complexity of an enterprise-class system. Use what works, without specious limitations brought on by technical snobbery.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
If this is the worm I am thinking about, it was specific to one particular forum, which is quite popular and written in PHP. The exploit was a vulnerability in the source, not PHP itself. Is all JSP code automatically uber-secure?
And if the 'reward' of programming with a 'real' programming language is that much better, write your web-apps in C, or
This rating is Unfair ( ) ( ) Fair (*) Funny
Sigh... If only. Modding would be so much more fun.
The companion Web site for the book is hosted by Vaswani's software consulting firm, Melonfire.
Do I really want to read a book by someone who works for a consulting firm named after the ignition of fruit?It's only free if you release your web app as GPL also.
Not very free IMHO.
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
I must be some kind of retard, I build my stuff with Perl and PostgreSQL.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
Not trolling... I code PHP for a living. I maintain a codebase of around 750,000 lines of complicated legacy code.
I use vim, but make sure you set ctags up.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
If anyone can point me to a good *free* PHP editor for Linux, I'd be very glad.
Kate
Has syntax highlighting (including recoginizing builtin functions), bracket matching, code folding, regex search and replace, blah blah.
If you want one that does fancier stuff like show you class structures etc, then I dunno. Eclipse has a PHP plugin I heard - dunno how it works. One of my friends is huge into zend studio (non-free), but he works at a university (where they think nothing of spending a students tuititions worth on a computer - what do you mean our programmers don't need 23" apple cinema displays?)
Speak before you think
I\'ve just read this book, and it\'s great! I\'m going to use PHP and MySQL for all of my web-based apps now!
Look at the examples given in the companion web site. There is code like the following, which is highly vulnerable to SQL injection attacks:
Validate? Just by removing trailing spaces? People trusting this book's advice will be very sorry soon.
One more example:
No validation at all! User input thrown into the database without any check!
It's unbelievable that in 2005, after all the outrage and cry about SQL injection ther is still a new book proposing such horrible code!
I'm working on a simulator that involves large amounts of data, and originally started work with MySQL. It's so popular that I assumed it was the easiest to use. Since our product is sold as a workstation, I quickly realized that each unit would cost us $200 for the MySQL server. A quick search uncovered PostGres, which has really turned out to be just as easy to use, is free, and even has a .NET interface and simple administrative utility. Pretty nice. I don't know if it's slower than MySQL, but it's plenty fast for me. You can even do transaction processing. It's strange that even though PostGres is so old, there are almost no books available for it (aside from the Douglas text), while MySQL has dozens.
PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, and many other database systems (including commercial and open source) have been ACID compliant for quite some time. Not to mention the abundance of features that other database systems have, like stored procedures, triggers, views, subselects, etc. Many of those features have not yet made their way into MySQL and may not until 5.1; some have been recently added to production releases; others are still in "5.0" beta.
Even then, data integrity and features have never been a primary concern of MySQL developers.
Access manages to beat MySQL; MySQL completely chokes (for whatever reason) on joins that Access handles in seconds. SQL Server, PostgreSQL handle these queries fine.
Tomcat must have progressed quite a bit in the last 5 years then.
.jsp.
It certainly has. Especially in terms of performance. The latest Tomcat (5.5) approaches the speed of Apache in some cases.
Yes, you could run Tomcat on port 80, with no Apache, but I seem to recall that Tomcat specifically leaves out much of the functionality that Apache does natively- perhaps lock something down by IP, etc.
This is all available now (RemoteHostValve, RemoteAddrValve etc).
Once you've gone through the nightmare of setting this up properly, you then get to learn Ant to make your WARs. While I did find Ant appealing/nice/whatever, it's quite a bit more complex than you're making it up to be to be serving up
The latest versions of NetBeans (4.0, 4.1) does this for you. Every change to a J2EE project automatically updates your WAR file. It even (again automatically) writes and maintains Ant scripts so that you can do this from the command line as well.
I do feel a lot of the criticism of Java/JSP/J2EE is based on the way things were years ago. This have changed a lot!
Worse than that, if the table type isn't available and you try to use it, MySQL doesn't fail. It'll happily go on, ignoring that you asked for InnoDB tables with ACID compliance, and pretend that it's actually doing something when you ask it to open/commit/rollback a transaction. This is one of those "user friendly" features that really isn't, and MySQL has a bad habit of doing crap like this. If I want a table of a certain type, and that type isn't available, the DDL should cause a failure. It shouldn't succeed silently, choosing a different table type than what I asked for.
Don't forget, implementing those features will make MySQL slow! Real programmers don't need them! Well, not until MySQL implements them, anyway (wait, I thought implementing them would make MySQL slow? They's gots some kind of magic that can keep MySQL fast after implementing features that'll make it slow? Well hot damn!).
Features come and go, and I have no doubt that the MySQL developers will continue to advance MySQL until it can effectively mimic a real RDBMS. The lack of features is just an additional reason to complain about MySQL. The real reason why Those Who Know Better (tm) give them so much shit is the developers' attitudes, that they think they know so much more than development houses that have spent 20+ years researching and building real RDBMS engines (Oracle, IBM, and even Microsoft). If MySQL developers would've just said something along the lines of, "We understand the importance of foreign keys for proper referential integrity enforcement, but we have other priorities right now and want to make sure that when we do implement foreign keys that we do so in a robust and performant way," I wouldn't have ever had a problem with MySQL lacking foreign key support (just used as an example). Instead, they had an attitude like, "You don't need foreign keys. If we implemented them, they'd slow down MySQL, and besides, if you're a good enough developer you can compensate for the lack of foreign keys in your application code." That attitude earned them the scorn and distrust of anybody who knows anything about RDBMS design and usage.