I recently received a copy of this book from the publisher for review. We try
to stay focused on SQL, but occasionally we tackle subjects that are slightly
outside of SQL that might still be of interest to our readers.
MySQL obviously doesn't have the depth of
features that SQL has, but it one key feature - price! Even if you're a SQL only
environment, sooner or later you'll end up dealing with someone that is using
MySQL. Plus, we all like to be well rounded, right?
I'll also add that I'm not a MySQL or PHP expert by any means. That made the
book more interesting to me, more new stuff to browse and learn. The first three
chapters cover database design, using MySQL, and how to do queries. Interesting
how the syntax is very similar in some places as SQL, very different in others -
for example to do a Top N query you add the keyword 'limit' to the end of the
query. Weird? Different anyway.
The next four chapters cover PHP. Think of PHP as roughly the same thing as
ASP, a scripting language that you use to help serve web pages. From what I
could tell the chapters do a job of introducing the language. If you're coming
from ASP you'll see lots of similar concepts since after all, HTML is HTML! The
syntax is definitely different, not unexpected, and seems to be decipherable.
The remainder of the book puts the two applications to work, starting with a
simple guest book app and working through a threading system, content
management, problem tracking, even a shopping cart. This is good stuff because
to really learn it, you need to have a project that gets you to put it to work.
Starting with one of these sample projects would be a great way to do that.
The book also has come coverage of good coding habits and project management,
always good things to discuss when you're talking about building any non trivial
app (and probably even the trivial ones). It comes with a CD that has MySQL v4,
PHP v4 (and v5 beta), Apache, plus a bunch of scripts that help set up the
sample applications.
Book is 764 pages soft cover, released October 2003. See the table of
contents and a sample chapter at the
publishers site. Runs about $28 on
Amazon right now, not a bad price at all. Bottom line, I'd guess that if you
know SQL and ASP, you'd find this book helpful in translating some core concepts
and implementation into MySQL/PHP. It's got enough coverage for someone to start
from scratch, but I think it might be overwhelming for a novice.
I'm going to hedge here and not give this review a rating because I don't
think I've used it enough or looked at other books that cover the topics to
really give an accurate rating. If we have any readers that are using these
technologies and would like to take a look at the book, drop a note in the
attached forum and I'll pick one at random!
Note: Our thanks to Wiley for providing us with a free review copy.