Reviews for Beginning PHP and MySQL: From Novice to Professional, Third Edition

1. Very nice referance

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, January 12th, 2010

   If you are looking for a book that will take you trough php and mysql by creating some example application out of the book then this might not be the right book. But if you are allready a bit familiar with php and mysql this book is absolutely great! By just reading it onces you will learn the endless possibilities you have with mysql and php. After that it serves as a great reference. Whenever i'm coding I often find myself looking things up in this book. If I want to do something but dont know exactly how, I dive into the book. If I need a little refreshment on a function or statement in php, I dive into the book. A very very good referance guide.

2. Author or publisher can't be bothered to publish errata!! (and boy do they need to)

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, January 12th, 2010

   I come from a programming backround, however I did struggle a bit with this book to begin with. What's missing is some practical exercises so as the reader can become familiar with the syntax and concepts of PHP through doing (and thinking!), rather than solely thinking. Once I'd gone through the tutorial at php.net, and written a few 10-line PHP utilities as part of another, mainly non-PHP, project, then I was able to come back to this book and get far more out of it.
   
   I probably would have scored it a three/three and a half based on the experiences outlined already, were it not for the following:
   
   There are a number of typo's, errors and mistakes, which are not the end of the world on their own - but what really bugs me is that the author and/or publisher have an errata page up on the Apress site, but THEN DO NOT DISPLAY ANY ERRATA THAT HAVE BEEN ENTERED !!!
   
   I've put a few errata on there, and they do not appear underneath in the section for "confirmed errata". In fact this section is empty. Are they really saying that NO-ONE has been able to point out any errata that they agree need to be corrected? I know not every erratum will be sustained, but come on, do they really expect us to believe that EVERY SINGLE person who claims to have found an error in this book (and there are plenty, read these reviews) is WRONG !!
   
   Don't be so arrogant....
   
   Or are they filtering out the errata because there are too many of them, or for whatever other reason. OK, if you don't want errata DO NOT HAVE A ERRATA PAGE !!
   Otherwise you are abusing people's time, those who want to help you improve the book and are prepared to take the time to (essentially) proof-read the book for you (for free).
   
   Someone else like me could come along, not see that I have already entered errata X, and waste their time by putting it on again....

3. Yet another misleading title.

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, June 12th, 2009

   This book reads like it was designed by committee. It tries to do too much in too many areas but doesn't really succeed anywhere.
   
   The biggest moan I have with this book is its huge emphasis on Pear. If you want to write a book on Pear, fine, write a book on Pear, but call it "Beginning Pear", or at least mention Pear in the title. Why do the authors seem so terrified of mentioning Pear? Yet, the book is chock full of techniques that require Pear. The quoted dogma is as follows: "Good programmers write decent code. Great programmers use other people's decent code". All fine and Dandy, but if I want to use other people's code, I will use Joomla or Drupal, and buy the relevent book.
   
   So if you want to learn PHP without Pear, knock off another star for a start.
   
   Rather than concentrate on Pear, a book titled "Learning Php and Mysql" should spend its time doing just that. So don't just gloss over the oop functionality, explain it properly!
   
   I normally like the Apress progrmamming books, but they have really dropped the ball with this one.

4. Poor book

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, June 12th, 2009

   This is certainly not a book for a beginner learning php for the first time, it's not even adequate as a reference manual. It's not just the mistakes and poor examples and explainations that other reviews have mentioned. a considerable number of important functions are completely missing for example the book covers file system functions and explains rmdir() in depth and gives an example script yet astonishingly mkdir() is not covered at all or even mentioned once in the book! This is only one example of quite a few remarkable omissions.

5. Great book to start with

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, June 12th, 2009

   This is a great book to start with. I'd recommend that you start with a little guide (just to know the basics of the basics of PHP ;)) and then use this book! There is a lot of stuff in here, and the author keep telling you which chapter you will learn more about a specific thing. Its very good, because they you dont fell confused about some strange code lines or something like that.
   
   If you have tried programming of some sort, then go for this book. Its cheap, has a lot of material and covers a very wide spectrum of PHP!