Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL: A Book Review

Title:
Web Database Applications with PHP and
MySQLAuthor: Hugh E.
Williams and David LanePublisher:
O'Reilly &
AssociatesISBN:
0596000413Price: $44.95This book is subtitled Building Effective
Database-Driven Web Sites, and I feel it is right on
target. This is not a book for someone unfamiliar with programming,
but if you have a programming background, the book will get you
thinking about web design (system design, not graphic design), as
well as PHP and MySQL programming.Additionally, if you have dabbled with PHP and/or MySQL and
are now ready to update your system design skills and move onto a
larger project, this is a good book to move you along.The book is logically organized into four parts: learning the
tools, developing the application logic, a case study and five
supporting appendices. The first part has chapters that cover the
traditional three-tier architecture used in web database
applications. It is followed by a chapter on PHP and a chapter on
MySQL and SQL in general. There is enough information in the PHP
chapter to make a programmer pretty comfortable with PHP. The
database chapter is primarily focused on MySQL, but it also touches
on other SQL databases.In the next part of the book, these three tools--the
three-tier approach, PHP and MySQL--are combined to start building
an application. Chapter four is about queries, chapter five covers
user-driven queries and chapter six discusses writing to databases.
Throughout this part an on-line wine store is used as a practical
example. When you get through this section you should be fairly
comfortable developing a basic application.Chapters seven through nine then add all the stuff you didn't
want to think about, including validation with PHP on the server
and JavaScript on the client. The next thing you didn't want to
think about is sessions, which are covered well in chapter eight.
The advantages and disadvantages of each method is presented, and
illustrations are included where it makes sense to have
them.The next logical step is authentication and security, which
are the subjects of the following chapter. How authentication works
is discussed, with a couple of illustrations supplied to help
clarify things. The practice of authentication and dealing with
security is then addressed.The third part of this book finishes up the wine store
example, covering things like the customer management code, a
shopping cart, order handling and shipping. The last chapter,
appropriately titled "Related Topics", covers all the stuff you
might have left out, such as automatic housekeeping, templates,
searching and browsing. The template section uses the XTemplate
library.The five appendices cover installation of MySQL, Apache and
PHP, protocols, the relational database model, session management
in the database tier (as opposed to session management in PHP, as
was previously covered) and resources. The resources appendix is
divided into client-, middle- and database-tier resources, plus a
short list of security and cryptography resources.For the right audience, this book puts a lot of information
together in one place, making it possible for the authors to
address all the important interactions between these various
elements.The bad parts are some minor misstatements in the
introductory text and the lack of serious coverage of
object-oriented programming. While PHP isn't a serious
object-oriented language, seeing where OOP makes sense in the
process would have been a plus. The book has about four pages on
what OOP is in PHP, but it is not used in the examples.All in all, this is a very good book. I have lots of books on
PHP and databases and have found myself looking in multiple books
in order to synthesize an answer. In many cases I can see the
complete answer in this one book. If you don't need computer
concepts and language hand-holding but want to do a database-driven
web application right, this book is well worth the price.Phil Hughes is the publisher
of Linux Journal.

email: phil@ssc.com