Great Starter Book
I like this book because it combined Dreamweaver and PHP and shows in detail how to create recordsets and create a site from scratch. The book goes into detail on how to setup a LAMP and WAMP server. I used this book as a reference when I first started learning PHP. I recommend this book to all PHP beginners.
The Book that Finally Explained it!
I use Dreamweaver MX 2004 and had been struggling for months trying to build my dynamic website using PHP and mySQL. This book took me through every step. I was able to finish my site in a week.
If you use Dreamweaver MX 2004 and are trying to build a dynamic PHP site this is hands-down the book you need! I've recommended it to everyone I know who are in the same position I was - frustrated and thinking I would never finish my site.
Thank you Kent and Powers!! I'll be looking for additional books from them.
Review on PHP Web Development with Macromedia Dreamweaver
Pro: Excellent appendix on setting up Aapche, PHP and MySQL server.
Con: Material covered are too brief.
I purchased this book since I am interested in learning Dreamweaver and PHP for Web development. If you are like me, who is interested in learning Dreamweaver, this is not the book for you. This book only briefly cover the Dreamweave and then shift the focus mostly on PHP and MySQL programming using Dreamweave environment. The problem is that this book doesn't cover the topics on PHP and MySQL very well. Information presented in the book are very brief and can only serve as tutorial at best. I constantly looking for other reference books to assist my learning on the subjects presented in this book.
The reason why I gave this book a 4 star is because this book does have an excellent appendix on how to setup PHP, MySQL and Apache server which helped me successfully setup my development environment on my computer. Other reason is that this book serve as an excellent self-taught manual that present important points on the topics I should know about PHP and MySQL web development. Combine with other more detailed reference books, this book is great to get anyone going with PHP and MySQL web development.
My Most Useful Web Design Book
I am only halfway through this, but I have already picked up many invaluable tips in using Dreamweaver to automatically insert handy javascript and PHP code. With most technical books I'll read a chapter or two and then put it aside for reference, but with this book I have been able to plow right through it, using the examples to learn different techniques.
Great on Instruction Poor on explanation
Look this book is OK; hence the 3. Chapter 9 is worth the money for the book alone. Now if you have little or no experience with PHP you are going to look at the code that Dreamweaver creates and you are going to be totally lost because the book does not explain the code that is created by Dreamweaver. None, Notta, Zilcho, not even a smidgen. Now that is my only real complaint. I wish I could recommend another book but I am not aware of another one. Overall this book has a lot of good information but gets a hard hit for lack of code explanation. Good luck.
