Book Review: Learning PHP & MySQL

The book, quite popular and now in its second edition, fits into the interactive web technology domain. This domain typically involves using ASP, JSP or PHP for coding the dynamic web pages, a web server like Apache or IIS for publishing, an application server like Weblogic, Jboss and the back end database like MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server.

For the techies interested in using open source technologies in the above domain, this book gives a useful introduction to working on the M and P out of the LAMP architecture. The concepts introduced in this book are useful for developing MySQL database linked dynamic websites based on PHP .

The discussion involves setting up a simulated environment using the Apache web server for publishing the web pages and setting up the back end database before getting started with some examples. In addition to the discussions on syntax and rules for interaction the authors discuss the internal workings when a PHP dynamic page is interactively used with the back end MySQL database. There are useful examples to allow the reader to grasp how to control the interaction between the database and the dynamic pages.

The discussions on Cookies, Sessions and Access Control, Security and Validation , and Error Handling make this a well-rounded book for the basic to the intermediate readers and implementers of these technologies. One particular aspect that seems to be a possible good addition to future editions of this book is the interaction with application servers in between the web and the database when considering these open source technologies.