Great Book, I am missing the CD though.
I like this book and I find it very informative. I have both the first edition and the second edition. Second edition is a must buy, I would't get the first edition unless you are just hard up on cash at the moment.
However since my copy of the book came with a broke cd, I can't explore it very well. If anyone has a copy of the CD or knows where I download one I would be glad to take it off of your hands or download it.
Thanks,
d a r k n e s s v b @ a o l . c o m
A General Guide
When most individuals cover a topic in a non-fiction book they start generally then begin honing in on their topic. This book never seems to get to the specifics. They spend so much time introducing individuals to the topic of PHP and MySQL that they hardly ever get to specifics. When they do get to specifics they do a good job of covering what needs to be covered.
This may be a result of the fact that the book was written by a number of authors. Overall it is a nice reference book to have and good if you are just beginning but not extremely valuable for experienced programmers.
Loved it!
I'm puzzled by the negative reviews. I'm a 30 year vet in computing, recently retired, and doing web/tech computing part time. I've needed to grasp parts of computing that I haven't been involved with, and boy did these guys get it right!
I loved the comment about "The bulk of this chapter is for those of you who have made it to the early 21st century without working with relational databases!" That's me! And the writing was just right in terms of code hints and kinks along with clear explainations of database concepts.
I'm reading the first edition, saw the second edition was out, and ordered it.
I will agree, however, that there are *many* editing mistakes where they mistake terms or have errors in their tables/code. Hopefully the 2nd edition solves this.
bogus code
Unfortunately for me I spent the $40 for this book. What a mistake!
When I first opened it up I was exited by the project management example in chapter 17. I told my wife I must have it! After I got home and started reading through it I decided to load the sample data into the my htdocs directory in my local Apache install. The nightmare never ended in getting the code to work. And this wasn't because I didn't set up the user accounts in MySQL! After messing around with it all weekend I decided to pay my fried a visit who is an expert web developer (builds web-enabled databases for California lobyists with millions of records). He looked at the code and found constructs that are specific to PHP5. The readme didn't say that I must install PHP5 for the examples to work. Anyway, after changing the code to conform to PHP4 syntax the examples still didn't work.
I'm totally disappointed that I spent my hard earned dollars on this book. If the authors would be kind enough to post some code that works and is easy to follow, that would be a good step at repentance. Oh, one last thing, the authors make use of PEAR; that was a pain to install too. However, I got that working (with no instructions in the book) and the code still fails to work.
Two thumbs down for this book.
Well written, but now outdated
This is a great book, two years ago. I have spent more time and energy than I wish over the last two months trying to get the syntax differences down, and hunt down bugs in the code I'm writing. A new edition is out expected out in August, in which PHP 4.2 and MySQL 4.1 are to be covered. While no published book will keep up with the advancing of technologies that are standards today, this new edition will be much much closer to what is in use right now.Wait if you can, otherwise, you're in for a headache.
