Beginning PHP 5 E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional is an ideal reference for intermediate PHP 5 and MySQL developers, and programmers familiar with web development technologies. This book covers every step of the design and build process, and provides rich examples that will enable you to build high-quality, extendable e-commerce websites. Take a peek at an actual book example!

Furthermore, this book covers site building in three phases. Phase one results in a live website, with an attractive interface and fully searchable product catalog. Next, phase two explains adding facilities to increase sales through cross-selling, upselling, and enhancing customer service. Finally, phase three seeks to reduce costs through automated order processing and integrating with other systems via XML Web services.

Beginning PHP 5 E-Commerce shows you how to build a full E-commerce website from design to deployment. This book will be one of the first books dedicated specifically to PHP/MySQL E-commerce development. Guiding you through every step of the design and build process, this book will have you building high-quality, extendable E-commerce websites quickly and with confidence.

This book is primarily aimed at intermediate PHP 5 and MySQL developers willing to learn how to develop quality E-commerce sites. This book is also appropriate for programmers experienced with other web development technologies like ASP.NET or Java, who learn best by example, and want to experience PHP/MySQL development techniques first hand or who need to refer to a quick documentation for a fully developed E-commerce website.

This book shows you how to build a site in three phases. The first phase puts the site live on the web, with an attractive interface and fully searchable product catalog. You can start receiving orders right away, using PayPal’s service to handle the shopping cart, checkout, and payment. The second phase adds facilities to increase sales through cross selling and upselling, enhanced customer service, and a better shopping experience. Along the way you’ll build your own shopping basket and checkout, but continue to use PayPal for credit card processing. In the third phase, to reduce costs, you’ll find out how to automate order processing, and carry out your own credit card transactions through Verisign PayFlow Pro, and learn how to integrate with other systems using XML Web Services.

No longer useful
I’ve been using this book for the past few business weeks. Yes, weeks.

First and foremost, this book is extremely well written, well cited, and clear. Examples are concise, and it rarely leaves you floundering to understand a topic. The ideas are presented in a logical order, proceed clearly, and generally, consist of helpful hints and instructions.

UNFORTUNATELY, all of the code in this book is pretty much worthless. Every bit of it is outdated, and in the 134 pages of the book that I have suffered through, I have had major problems at every step. From having major issues with integrating PEAR (installation has completely changed since the writing of this book, and the major database functions it uses have changed, and the documentation in the book and on the PEAR website are not clear on this), to having to track down irregular and outdated code, not a single feature has been implemented easily or correctly on the first attempt (even ignoring any errors that I made myself due to my inexperience).

I have wasted hours on this book, thinking that it will eventually get to the point where I’m not running into compatibility issues. This may end up being the case, but taking several business days (2.5 weeks invested in just this book) worth of my time to get through 134 pages (mainly spent debugging and perusing forums to find solutions) is just not worth it.

I will be buying the second edition, and I hope that it fixes these issues.

It’s really a shame, because the theory in this book is truly awesome. Implementing it, however, is a nightmare, especially for a beginner.

Great
Although I am having A LOT of trouble implementing all the code, this is the only book I have seen that will actually walk you through all the steps. And the author actually does reply to his emails. I would definitely recomend his second edition of this book.

Introduction to E-Commerce and the Smarty Framework
I’ve read, and enjoyed, other books by Cristian Darie. This book is no different. This book shows how to use PHP 5 and the Smarty framework to produce an E-Commerce site. The Smarty framework is a good choice for PHP developers seeking to implement a good template. This book fills a gap by being a good introduction to this framework as well.

If you are not familiar with Smarty, the following description is from their web site:

Smarty is a template engine for PHP. More specifically, it facilitates a manageable way to separate application logic and content from its presentation. This is best described in a situation where the application programmer and the template designer play different roles, or in most cases are not the same person.

This book guides you as the author develops an advanced E-Commerce system. Think of something such as Amazon, complete with product reviews, customer and catalog management. Once the user is finished reading the book they are left with working catalog order system that they can modify to suit their needs. Or completely create their own similar system.

The table of contents for the book follows:

Chapter 1: Starting an E-Commerce Site
Chapter 2: Laying Out the Foundations
Chapter 3: Creating the Product Catalog: Part I
Chapter 4: Creating the Product Catalog: Part II
Chapter 5: Searching the Catalog
Chapter 6: Receiving Payments using PayPal
Chapter 7: Catalog Administration
Chapter 8: The Shopping Basket
Chapter 9: Dealing with Customer Orders
Chapter 10: Product Recommendations
Chapter 11: Customer Details
Chapter 12: Implementing the Order Pipline: Part I
Chapter 13: Implementing the Order Pipeline: Part II
Chapter 14: Credit Card Transactions
Chapter 15: Product Reviews
Chapter 16: Connecting to Web Services

Misleading
I have purchased a multitude of books from Amazon over the years. However, I have never written a book review, no matter how bad the book turned out to be. But, there is always a first time. This is one of the worst - if not the worst - tech books I have ever read, and with over 25 years of Engineering and Software development experience I have read a lot of books.

Now I know why Apress doesn’t let you look inside their books on the Amazon website before you purchase. If they did there might not be an Apress at all. First, there is nothing "novice" about this book. Second, you had better know how to use Smarty, and I mean use it well. Don’t rely on the Smarty website documentation to help and there are not many definitive books on the subject either. I only found one title devoted to Smarty on Amazon and that would cost another 39.99.

I typically like to review books in the local bookstore and take a gander at Amazon "reviews" before purchase. However, I couldn’t find the book locally (which should have told me something) and I failed to pay proper attention to the reviews, i.e., take a look at Michael Brand’s review. The editorial book review doesn’t even mention Smarty which is a major part of this book.

This book reviews at 4.5 stars. From this, I can only assume the large majority of those reviewing the book work at Apress or are kin to the authors. After the first three chapters I was seeing stars. Don’t be suckered in to buying this book unless you are thoroughly familiar with Smarty.

So, if your an experienced -not novice- php/mysql programmer and Smarty wizard, and love to read(and debug) code with little useful explanatory info, then by all means buy this book. Oh, did I mention it makes a great coaster for coffee?

JC.

The Right Book
I dont usually spend time writting this stuff, and when i did it, it was not for good reasons. But this time, i’m really really really happy about the material in the book, it not only teaches you about the code, it get depth really depth in how you must implement, think, best practices, and a lot of things that even if you are an experienced programer havent thought about.
If i could give the book 10 stars, i would.

Great programming cookbook
This book really helped me start my site. I was new to php and databases at the time, and I always learn best by example. By the time I finished the book, I had way more examples than I needed -- and a skeleton for my site.

Nice, practical approach and very clear and pleasant writing
I must agree with some of the comments posted here that this book provides a narrow view to developing an e-commerce web application. The book is about building a web shop with PHP5, Mysql and the template engine Smarty and that’s what it’s about.

I can understand some of the remarks that have been made about this book presenting one single approach to building a web shop, which could be seen as a disadvantage. I however see this as an advantage. This book doesn’t present a pile of theory and then leaves you on your own. It presents a clear and in my opinion very practical method for building a web application with PHP5 and Smarty.

The thing I just loved about this book is that I understand everything. I am not new to PHP, but I am rather new to the concepts of object oriented programming and template engines. This book very clearly describes a practical way of using these concepts to build your own application. Sure it’s just ONE approach to getting the job done, but it’s a good one and very clearly explained.

If you have some experience using PHP and some experience with OO concepts I can highly recommend this book. I loved the author’s clear writing style and understood almost everything he did because of the nice "How it works" paragraphs after the code examples. This book was totally worth the money and I intend to buy this author’s book on C# e-commerce too, because this guy knows how to EXPLAIN things. Thanks to this book this PHP beginner will soon publish his first complete PHP web application!

Quality book for getting the job done.
Having read all of the reviews about this book, I must interject as based on some of the more negative responses. The principal behind this book isn’t on teaching you PHP by little examples here and there, and then an assimilation of little projects. It’s a book designed on making a fully function eCommerce web application for usage on a small to medium professional level. The methodologies of this book are a 100% PHP5. Pure object oriented scripting, involving a new standard for database connection via the PEAR DB class, and utilizing the SMARTY template engine. I see there’s some negative response in using the SMARTY template engine, as it’s deemed "unnecessary" or even a means to hype this open source product.

What people must understand is that one of the contributors to this book is not only well versed in advanced PHP development, he’s also an ASP.net developer. Because ASP.net is the "enemy" of PHP, there’s obviously little or no amount of understanding how that language works in comparison to PHP. PHP is a pure scripting language, even if it has means to develop objects and classes. It’s a very loose, loose "nuts and bolts" language. And it has no inherent structure. You make up the rules. So, there’s a tendency for not only sloppy spaghetti code, but also sloppy methodology. Data queries can sit in the same exact page as to where the front end HTML sits. And this can be some very ugly code if you need to get back to it in a few months. Also, if you need to expand or put more advanced features in your site, it’d be almost as an enormous task as just rebuilding it from scratch trying to decipher what you have done with out a structure. Hence a need to separate out the data, the filtering, and the presentation level.

In ASP.net, being a newly developed OO language, the main principal in designing on the front end is called "Code behind" or, in 2.0 "code beside". What this entails is that when you open up a brand new .aspx (the file extension of a ASP.net page), you’re not getting just one flat text file. You’re getting a file that refers to various other files that sit "behind" the one that you’re about to work on. When you script out your page utilizing the .net classes, it then automates a whole lot of behind the scenes scripting in VB/C# and even Javascipt. In the end, you get these advanced features that you would have had to spend many more hours developing in other methods and server languages.


So, it’s quite obvious they are taking a .net philosophy and placing it in a PHP word. What I learned the most from this book isn’t so much coding, but rather...metholodly. It’s utilizing a three tier levels of development: a data layer, a business (filtering) layer, and a presentation layer. This is standard practice in the world out side of PHP.

I see that there are more advanced programmers than I that claim this isn’t "professional code" All I can say to that is: This book isn’t created for an enterprise level project. This is for a small to middle sized business who has a shoe string budget, but with a highly professional agenda. By the time any business out grows a catalog of this nature, they’d also have the budget to hire some of the top notch .jsp or .net programmers out there too.

So it’s a great book for getting the job done. My only complaint is: It has some very strange naming conventions for the variables, sometimes even confusing (such as redundant ones like "product" and "products" I found my self debugging pages because of this problem. But I’d rather deal with that then to have a book with actual buggy code)

It even teaches you how to build the back end Content Management system to update your catalog with...(I actually think is even a better application than the Catalog it’s self)

I’m using this book for my project, and I’m grateful for all the details and nuances that it’s provided for me. My PHP level is full graduated novice, into the intermediate level who just wants to jump to the advanced level with out fretting. This book is a great means to do so...

Incorrect Title!
I was highly disappointed that after reading about 1 1/2 chapters the book utilizes something called smarty, which is not mentioned in any of the descriptions about the book. So really the title should be Beginning PHP 5, MySQL and Smarty. If you are like me and and do not want to deal with setting something else up or use a hosting company that is not open to setting this up, the only use of this book is for reference. I will say it does have some good material and can open up some ideas for an e-commerce site, you just have to figure out the work arounds.

Focused - but have to tough it out
I am an amateur programmer with an interest in e-commerce and community sites.

I found this book focused, but rough around the edges. First, we are dealing with open source tech. At times, it can be very difficult given the fact that a lot of the documentation provided by open source providers is sketchy, at best. So, there is a certain level at which the book communicates.

While there is some critique on methodology, it appears that the authors have a good enough grasp on PHP to communicate the fundamentals. I wonder if explanations would be simpler if they had more experience with it.

I am DRIVEN to learn e-commerce. So, I’ve spent hours with this book. While PHP doesn’t have a very long learning curve, it does take effort. I have found that designing/programming with extensions (such as Interakt (interaktonline.com) for Dreamweaver) still requires a knowledge of the underlying source.

The Smarty thing is a drag. While we should obviously be aware of Smarty - and, of course, PEAR - the near strict reliance on Smarty templates seemed to be a cop out. IF YOU DO NOT CONFIGURE SMARTY AND PEAR CORRECTLY YOU WILL HAVE A BAD TIME WITH THIS BOOK. You will get no further than page 38!!

To be continued . . . .

Tony

Good Tutorial Book
I have really been enjoying this book. Paticularly the Smarty and OOP aspects. The downside of this book is also an upside for me, it takes a certain take on building an E-Commerce application, and gives you the tools to build it. While the book relys heavily on PEAR and Smarty, as an experienced programmer, I can replace it with other templating engines, or even write my own database abstraction library for it. This book provides a narrow view in order to get you started, but as long as you either have the experience to convert between libraries, or are willing to use the ones they suggest. This book will be a valuble introduction. This is the first non-reference programming book that I’ve liked, and I doubt it will go on my shelf, I will instead proboly pass it on to someone who is learning PHP.

The only downside for me, is that they rely on a feature of PHP to escape strings going into MySQL. While this may keep your average cracker out, an experienced cracker will be able to find a way in, it does not use the tools PEAR::DB provides to solve this problem. That said, any program should be reviewed by a security professional before going live, even the most experienced coders make mistakes.

uh... horrible.
I bought this 6 months ago and finally cracked it open.. I’ve been developing web sites for 8+ years... I’m a novice at PHP and program flash & actionscript... I’d call this book horrible at best.. to start you have to install apache on your computer... considering they give no follow up to where to edit the Apache files... and I can’t figure it out.. this book is pointless... this is far from a "Beginner’s Guide".

The Book is a fraud
The title of the book is Beginning PHP5 and Mysql

I do not belibe it says PHP & and Pear there is very little MySql I am very disapointed with this book if I could get my money back I would What a discrace of the Author to decive The readers

Excellent starting point
If you are new to PHP and MySQL, this is a great book to get you started. I am a MS CS graduate. I never feared programming. But I just have a hard time finding a good book... I tried many other books that deals with PHP and MySQL. None of them I like because they only covers the bare basic. I needed more than that. I need something more like a complete project that goes from zero to finish. =) and I found this book.
I love the example from this book. It covers the concepts of the design (three-tiered design). I think that is important because nowaday, applications are getting more complex. It is only natural to separate the different tasks.
The use of template (SMARTY) engine is very cleaver. Some people may not like it, because it may be ’new’ (many people I spoke to dont know what SMARTY is). And therefore think that it introduced another layer of difficulty. but, once you grasp it, it works nicely. (maybe because I am from an OOP world, that everything just fits)

I also like the flow of the book. each chapter tackles a specific task. and my favorites is the screenshots of how should it looks like. Each chapters starts w/ an intro. and some concepts and some background of the functions to be implemented. The author gives clear explanation of how each peice of the code works. Which I find that not many other authors do. This helps a lot when you are a beginner. =)

Of course, as this title suggested, this is a beginner’s book. if you are looking for some details of anything specific, you might want to look else where. something like those complete reference books. =)

Again, if you are new to web technology and want to learn to get something up and running, this is a great book to start. that is what I did. =)
O, BTW, the author is a great help with my questions. Thank you Cristian.

Bad practice
I read this book to compare with my e-Commerce framework and design. It does get the job done, but I’m not impressed at all. The programmer who wrote it makes several glaring mistakes, among them is not to escape SQL in the lowest possible place -- i.e. the data layer, though he painstakingly seperates the code into 3 tiers. This is pretty amateur. Any site that uses this code, beware, it’s a trivial task to exploit this code.

The use of Smarty is also totally unneccesary. At least mention it in the title. I’m not a big fan of templates, and quite honestly it complicates everything. Why bring it up? It just makes things harder in the short-term. If someone wants to change the framework to use templates, let them. But in a how-to? Why?!

He also uses SETs instead of ENUMs where that can result in invalid values.

Based on the author’s credentials, it looks like he was figuring out PHP while he wrote it. He’s an ASP programmer. I mean, most of the principles are the same, but he misses the mark in several areas. I’m a little miffed.

I learned nothing by the way ...

Rating: 2 stars.

SMARTY NOT PHP and MYSQL - WASTE OF MONEY - E-CON WORST
I bought the Novice to Professional PHP 5 and MySql with this book and thought this would help when I was adequately ready to use it for E-commerce. I was wrong. From the beginning it wasted my time. If you don’t/can’t use SMARTY then you have no E-commerce site using this book.

Turnkey E-Commerce Website
I am a newbie when it comes to Website programming (although I am familiar with SQL theory and programming logic from programming in Delphi). I have worked the last eight weeks on a website from scratch (using this code from the book as the basis). Through trial and error (and internet searches), I am only now beginning to understand the whole PHP/MySQL concept. Nonetheless, we will be going LIVE this following Tuesday with a living, breathing, dynamic (as opposed to static), fully functional, secure website. It’s hard to believe.

We will have 128 bit SSL Security and Trust Certificate (thru Comodo purchased through our website host) with a live payment pipeline (purchased through Verisign). This means that we will be able to authorize and collect (after inventory is confirmed) MC/Visa payments in real time (seconds), with instant email confirmation of Order Received and Order Shipped. There is NO WAY I could’ve done this on my own... especially in 8 weeks. I know 8 weeks seems like a long time, but in terms of a fully functional, SECURE website, it really isn’t. I have ’tweaked’ the website a great deal to fit our look and requirements, but the basic MySQL database and logic are unchanged. I may have added another field here or there, and that is about it.

A couple of precautions though... you MUST have it hosted on a webhosting site that has PHP5 (save the frustration). You MUST have the webhosting company install the Pear Mail for your ’libs’ folder on your server. And your webhosting company will have to recompile php5 on their server with pfpro (verisign’s payment gateway file library). That’s it... If I would’ve known this to start with, it would’ve gone quicker than 8 weeks.

I don’t know if it’s OK to put in a plug for the webhosting company I am using (I am not a part of the company), but Nexcess.net out of Michigan has been terrific to work with. I probably wouldn’t have been able to find out all of the above paragraph without their help. They never complained... they only worked with me to get the job done. Probably other webhosting sites will do that also. I’m just pleased with them.

Smarty E-Commerce
The other reviewers did not emphasize a point I did not grasp until I bought the book. The book does not just introduce Smarty as a concept. A major trust of the book is Smarty. It could even be argued that the book is really about using Smarty for e-commerce and how to write PHP code to support Smarty. There is very little MySQL-specific info (mainly just an introduction to PEAR DB and use of standard SQL queries). If you are not planning to use Smarty for presentation templating, there is not much to be gained from reading this book. If you are going to use Smarty, then this book offers a cookbook approach with some theory.

As I will not be using Smarty in my project, I am dissapointed in the book and have gleaned just a few new ideas. Reading this book has also confirmed my decision to not use Smarty. In my opinion, Smarty needlessly adds a level of complexity on top of the PHP code and is not designed for editing in WYSIWYG editors such as Dreamweaver. There are several templating engines that are simpler to learn and use than Smarty (eg, Flexy). It seems to me that the whole book would have benefited from using a simpler templating engine and making the book less dependent on a single method of presentation (ie, Smarty).

Not bad
I read most of this book and the writing approach is not bad, but there is no way that this book is for professionals.
The topics covered are well explained and the code is precisely structured and properly divided, just like it should be with any object oriented book. The downfalls I consider for this book is that, it does not cover topics such as multiple database connections, which many websites now have (connecting to MySQL, Oracle, MSSQL simultaneously). And another extremely important topic not covered is the multi-lingual design. Most sites now require programmers to create sites in more than two languages (English, French, German, etc.) and I would like to see that in future versions of this book. Still this book is an excellent start for an E-commerce website with PHP (furthermore, the logic behind it is great for any e-commerce website).

Very good - but make sure host has php5.
I like the book - the language - the examples. I’m new to PHP so I didn’t understand the implications of the requirement to have PHP5 vs PHP4. Chapter 1 and 2 code examples worked OK with some minor tweeking (My host has PHP4xx). Chapter 3 is another story. I’ve looked around and most hosting companies have 4xx. I’m guessing this will change soon, but not sure if I should wait or fork out $$ to change host.