"A first class reference and highly recommended instructional guide."

"....All in all, it is a comprehensive guide to developing web applications using PHP and MySQL....."

"....If you don’t need computer concepts and language hand-holding but want to do a database-driven web application right, this book is well worth the price."

"....Recommended for its excellent examples which will save you thousands in case you need to develop a similar application."

"A useful book that offers a lot of varied information in one place for updating your skills...."

"O’Reilly books are often seen as the missing manuals and training courses for the open source world, and this book is no exception to this rule.

What do eBay, Amazon.com and CNN.com have in common?
They’re all applications that integrate large databases
with the Web. The popularity (and power) of these applications stems from their accessibility and usability: thousands of users can access the same data at the same time without theneed to install any additional software on their computers.

Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL offers
web developers a mixture of theoretical and practical information on creating web database applications. Using PHP, and MySQL, two open source technologies that are often combined to develop web applications, the book offers detailed information on designing relational databases and on web application architecture, both of which will be useful to readers who have never dealt with these issues before. The book also introduces Hugh and Dave’s Online
Wines, a complete (but fictional) online retail site that allows users to browse, search a database, add items to a shopping cart, manage their membership, and purchase wines. Using this site as an example, the book shows you how to implement searching and browsing, store user data, validate user input, manage transactions, and maintain security.

If you want to build small to medium-scale web database applications that can run on modest hardware and process more than a million hits a day from users, this book will show you how.

This new edition has been redesigned around the rich offerings of PEAR. Several of these, including the Template package and the database-independent query API, are fully integrated into examples and thoroughly described in the text. In addition, through a complex sample application--Hugh and Dave’s Wine Store--all the important techniques of dynamic content are introduced. Good design is emphasized, such as dividing logic from presentation. The book introduces PHP 5 and MySQL 4.1 features, while providing techniques that can be used on older versions of the software that are still in widespread use.

Hugh E. Williams is the Associate Professor in Information Retrieval in the School of Computer Science and IT at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. He teaches in all areas of computer science, and began teaching databases in 1995 and PHP programming in 2000. His research interests include building better web search engines, multimedia and genomic information retrieval, and designing fast data structures. When not at work Hugh likes to go running, watch Richmond play footy, follow the cricket, and write books. Hugh has a PhD from RMIT University.

Since the mid 1990s David Lane has worked as a software engineer and IT manager with the Multimedia Database Systems group at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. In that group he has helped to develop and commercialize the Structured Information Manager, a large-scale SGML/XML document repository and a high performance Web server. David has also worked with Australia’s largest telecommunications company, Telstra, in areas as diverse as Satellite Communications, Human Factors Research, and Electronic Document Interchange (EDI). David has a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Science (majoring in mathematics and computer science) from Swinburne University.

Web Database Applications shows Web developers how to build rich Web database applications using two leading open-source technologies, PHP and MySQL. The authors also assume use of the Apache Web server, which is by far the most common PHP scenario. Both PHP and MySQL are introduced from scratch, although this is a fast-paced book best suited to at least intermediate developers.

After a brief discussion of Web database applications, the authors offer a rapid tour of PHP essentials, including loops, expressions, functions and common mistakes. Next comes a quick-start guide to MySQL, focusing mainly on the SQL language itself. The following chapters tackle connecting to MySQL and other databases, implementing user-driven queries and enabling writing as well as reading data. There is a useful chapter on data validation, both on the client and the server and excellent coverage of another crucial subject: security and authentication. This looks at the fundamentals of HTTP authentication and examines security features in both Apache and PHP, identifying weaknesses and explaining pros and cons. The closing chapters form a detailed case study, an online wine store, with complete code available for download. It embraces user management, a shopping cart, searching, ordering and delivery, covering many key topics in the process. At the back of the book are appendices on a range of issues, including installation, Web protocols, database modelling and session management.

Web Database Applications is tightly-focused, packing in lots of solid technical information without wasting words. It does not pretend to cover all the potential uses of PHP, and the screen shots will not win prizes for design, but it’s a great handbook for building robust, secure database applications with these popular technologies. --Tim Anderson

What’s PEAR got to do with it
I wholly concur with the comments of D.Lloyd "TVT". I bought this book with the intention of building a website using PHP and MySQL only. I don’t want or need PEAR. Not a good book. Steer well clear if you are looking for a book on PHP and MySQL.

This book should hafe been called "Applications with PEAR and MySQL"
How annoying! Yet another book that professes to be about PHP, but is in fact about an extension of PHP which I for one don’t really want to use. I don’t need PEAR for my site. I am quite content with native PHP Mysql support. I want a book that explains the ins and outs of that.

This book assumes you will be using PEAR. All the DB stuff is done using PEAR. Native PHP MySQL support doesn’t get a look in.

Also, this book assumes you will want to use templates. I don’t I keep my php apps as lightweight as possible, so templates are not needed for me.

In my mind, a good learning book will teach you the basics you need to get the job done, and leave you in a better position to explore the extensions etc for yourself, or with the help of dedicated reading matter. Had this book set out to teach you PEAR, I am sure it would have been pretty good. But it didn’t. It set out to teach PHP. And it failed.

Doesn’t really lead by example
It’s a good and thorough book, and as far as it goes or any other book goes on this subject I would recommend it. There are however some caveats to this. The first is that there is a huge chunk in the middle which just lists a whole bunch of functions. It is essentially a reference section in the middle of the book. They do the same for MySQL as they do for PHP. So what are we upposed to do with this? Read amd memorise the whole lot?
It would have been a lot more helpful to bash through and construct a database application (which is what this book is about actually) and explain the code and have a reference section or a pullout at the end.
I now regularly use phpfreaks.com for their tutorials as this is what they do. Take a chunk of useful code, break it down bit by bit, line by line. when properly structured this is a much better way of learning as one really digests the commands and syntax. Just reading an incredibly dry list of commands and functions or being expected to do this is pretty unreasonable. I am still looking for that book that has a complex web application project that includes nearly all of the fnctions and syntax of PHP and MySQL where the reader is led through and comes out of the other end with a thorough understanding of all that is involved.
Summary: great reference book with an example of a web application towards the end of the book.

Extremely well written!
This book is an extremely well written book. The best thing about this book is that it builds a sample web database application (wine store) throughout the book.

The book is also very well organised which covers PHP fundamentals and demonstrates PHP’s tight intergration with MySQL. It also has an appendix covering Modelling and Designing Relational Databases.

The book also covers advanced stuff such as Sessions, Authentication and Security, etc.

The book has an installation guide for PHP, MySQL and Apache.

I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn PHP.

A must by!!!

Good concise and easy to understand
I like this book - yes it is a bit heavy in terms of pages but it also covers a few of the things that are harder to find in other books - The OOP section is a very good and worth reading. This one will be in my bag and book shelf for a while..

3.5 Stars Really
I would generally agree with much of what’s been said by other reviewers, particularly the poor support for Windows -- which is a reasonable environment for playing and practising -- and one would certainly imagine a popular choice for trying things out.

Another thing that bothered me was the number of errors. O’Reilly have a good system for reporting book errata on their website -- and I used it in this case, going through all reported errors in the book, pencil in hand. However, despite the number of errors reported for this book, there are others I’ve discovered in only my first couple of weeks of using it.

It can be quite hard to trust a book with so many errors, and when one is learning something, it’s much harder to spot errors except the hard way.

Once you do manage to get an environment set up in which you can play, it is a pretty reasonable book -- and I don’t think their concentrating on their winestore example is such a bad thing.

Good but not recommanded for beginners
average: Good book for intermediates i do not recommanded it for beginners or advance ppl.
The book show how to build up your web database system using php and mysql.
I am happy to have bought this book even if i do not using it a lot, i will rather prefer to use other references than this book.
Anyway this book provide a good practical usage of php and mysql.

I like:
- The step by step to learn php and mysql
- The author explain all the codes
- Good coverage of php and mysql

I do not like:
- Coding Mistakes
- Examples are missing: Only one example, the book Wine ecommerce system
- Some php function are not explained for example what will happen if we turn off the global variable off? does the script will work or not?