Product Description

If you're ready to create web pages more complex than those you can build with HTML and CSS, Head First PHP & MySQL is the ultimate learning guide to building dynamic, database-driven websites using PHP and MySQL. Packed with real-world examples, this book teaches you all the essentials of server-side programming, from the fundamentals of PHP and MySQL coding to advanced topics such as form validation, session IDs, cookies, database queries and joins, file I/O operations, content management, and more.

Head First PHP & MySQL offers the same visually rich format that's turned every title in the Head First series into a bestseller, with plenty of exercises, quizzes, puzzles, and other interactive features to help you retain what you've learned.

• Use PHP to transform static HTML pages into dynamic web sites
• Create and populate your own MySQL database tables, and work with data stored in files
• Perform sophisticated MySQL queries with joins, and refine your results with LIMIT and ORDER BY
• Use cookies and sessions to track visitors' login information and personalize the site for users
• Protect your data from SQL injection attacks
• Use regular expressions to validate information on forms
• Dynamically display text based on session info and create images on the fly
• Pull syndicated data from other sites using PHP and XML

Throughout the book, you'll build sophisticated examples -- including a mailing list, a job board, and an online dating site -- to help you learn how to harness the power of PHP and MySQL in a variety of contexts. If you're ready to build a truly dynamic website, Head First PHP & MySQL is the ideal way to get going.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #64649 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 812 pages

About the Author
Lynn Beighley is a fiction writer stuck in a technical book writer's body. Upon discovering that technical book writing actually paid real money, she learned to accept and enjoy it. After going back to school to get a Masters in Computer Science, she worked for the acronyms NRL and LANL. Then she discovered Flash, and wrote her first bestseller. A victim of bad timing, she moved to Silicon Valley just before the great crash. She spent several years working for Yahoo! and writing other books and training courses. Finally giving in to her creative writing bent, she moved to the New York area to get an MFA in Creative Writing. Her Head First-style thesis was delivered to a packed room of professors and fellow students. It was extremely well received, and she finished her degree, finished Head First SQL, and can't wait to begin her next book.

Lynn loves traveling, cooking, and making up elaborate background stories about complete strangers. She's a little scared of clowns.

Michael Morrison is a writer, developer, toy inventor, and author of books on Java, Web scripting, game development, and mobile devices. An instructor of Web-based courses, Michael is also the founder of Stalefish Labs (www.stalefishlabs.com), a company specializing in games, toys, and interactive media.

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Customer Reviews

Head First has nailed it!
Although, I am only halfway through the book (at the time of writing), I have been more than impressed with it. The skills the book has introduced to me are very practical, I have been able to apply them into my own work immediately. The book has not been afraid to repeat points, commands, etc - in fact that is one of the key concepts to the books way of teaching.

However, my one criticism for the book is the chapters are very long and I find it takes several hours to work through each one. For that reason it is more of a Sunday afternoon book and hence why I'm only halfway through it.

I would recommend this book to anyone that has read a few books on the subject of PHP MySQL as well as complete newbies, as it has consolidated what I already knew and introduced new ideas without being boring or insulting. In fact in many ways I wish I had read this book first.

Is too dumbed down with distracting graphics to be taken seriously.
It's ultimately up to you to find out what you need to know and whether or not this book covers it. I do feel, however, that I have to say a little about the approach taken by the authors/publishers here.

This book reads like a comic book. Lots of flashy graphics: page-wide speech bubbles and the like! Lots of 'wackiness': fonts all over the place and the like! It's basically a waste of space. It kinda screams, "Learning PHP is Fun if You've Got a Few Cartoons to Guide You!" This isn't true in my opinion -

If the subject is a dull and tawdry one, why are you learning PHP? People who feel they should learn it / enjoy some aspects of it / have to learn it, might benefit from a read of this book, as might someone who has done very little programming and wonders what's going on in the tech world. But otherwise, buy a formal but basic introduction to PHP and put the hours into coding: you'll get a lot further in just as much time and find the enjoyment in code implementation.

Great for quick start, bad for reference
I recently bought this book to get a combined introduction to PHP and MySQL. The book is written in a format that is intended for fast hands-on learning. As such, it holds a lot of graphic explanations. Although most people will be able to work through the book pretty fast, the information density is equally low. An ordinary textbook approach would probably be less lively and might require more concentration to go through, but it contains about five times the amount of information per page. At the same time, even simple things are hard to find back in the book because it has such a lively design. If you, after working through this book, want to set up your own "thing", you may spend a lot of time searching through this book; you know you read it somewhere, but where? Mostly, internet searches are more efficient.
It is unclear what the expected audience of the book is. It claims it is aimed at people that know something about SQL and programming, but at the same time, it spends pages explaining what a database is and why it can be so handy. After that, it indeed presumes you know something about SQL (although not too much). Finally, I found a number of errors in the book, that may confuse beginning programmers.

Would I recommend this? Hmm, if you are really a beginner ... maybe, otherwise: find yourself a good textbook.