Here's part 1 of my "PHP and MySQL Web Development" book review.

I feel bad about sitting on this book so long. I thought I should at least
get out a review-so-far. And if anyone else is eager to use this book,
please let me know and I will get it to you.

I think this is a well organized and well written book. It starts right off
with a solid review of PHP. For an ad hoc PHP hacker like myself, that
chapter 1 review was very good. It helped organize my somewhat scattered
knowledge of PHP, and I learned a few new details right off.

From there, the authors take you right into a nice, concrete example of
implementing a basic e-commerce site in PHP. The initial project is pretty
basic, but I found it very useful in refreshing and solidifying
what I already knew. The example has you persisting data to and reading it
back from a file, but at the same time the authors are preparing you
with additional information about why a file is less than ideal as
a data store.

After that it's back to PHP school with reviews of arrays and regular
expressions. Again, the material is thorough and well presented, and
I found I learned a few more new bits.

Chapter 5 gets us into what I guess I'd call intermediate PHP, here they
are starting to get you into modularity with putting PHP functions in
their own files, starting to get you into the idea of separating
presentation and content. At this point we also get introduced to PHP
classes, and this is all starting to be woven into the ways that PHP
can be used to build complex websites with reusable blocks of code.

I am just now getting into the MySQL part. One recommendation I'd make,
if you are trying to put together web server, PHP and MySQL, go with
a competent ready-to-roll LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) distro. I built
from scratch on a SuSE Linux, and while it was interesting and educational,
it also took quite a bit of work.

The MySQL part follows the model of using a fairly realistic if somewhat
simple bookstore application for the example. I'm hoping that this
will lead to some nice class-packaged MySQL interface that I can then
apply to some of my little personal web apps.

Hopefully I'll have more about that in part 2 before too long.

This book has the appearance of being 3 books cobbled together into one. Minor features are hammered to death while crucial steps are glossed over, even those in the software installation section of the book.

The CD has all the software you need to get started and the book has enough material to get you on your way but if you're serious about learning any of these 3 technologies you may need to get dedicated texts. ( )