More businesses and ambitious individuals are trying to bring applications to the Web but they are bewildered with the array of components and concepts needed to create a data-driven site. The cost, stability and ease of development using the Open Source PHP 4 scripting language and a MySQL database makes this combination the best choice for small and mid-size Web-based applications. PHP4/MySQL Database Applications demonstrates web-application development by presenting seven real, ready-to-use examples starting with a simple guess book and ending with a fully-functional e-commerce site with a shopping cart. Inexperienced users will learn the essentials of working with PHP4 and MySQL so they can start building and customizing database applications for the web right away!

Amazon.com Review How could the combination of PHP and MySQL--which is feature-rich, highly reliable combination, capable of dealing with large traffic volumes, and absolutely free of charge in most cases--be any better? In MySQL/PHP Database Applications, Jay Greenspan and Brad Bulger explain how to work with the capable pair, primarily for applications you might use on a Web site. If you take the time to study the advice and work through your own tests of the concepts presented, it's pretty much certain that you'll walk away with the knowledge you need to do serious development work with the PHP scripting language and the MySQL database server.

Rather than make up trivial programs just to illustrate aspects of the MySQL/PHP environment, this book features code snippets, each half a page or so in length, that illustrate the behavior of key code structures. For example, in explaining conditional statements in PHP, the book gives you a no-frills IF statement with real values in place. It's not always obvious how the code structures will behave in practice, but the book does a consistently good job of commenting intelligently on the place of each aspect of the language in a well-designed application. The latter half of the book attacks specific problems--a chat system, a guest book, and so on--and walks through the setup of MySQL and each important PHP function for each. --David Wall

Topics covered: The PHP server-side scripting language and the MySQL database server, explained for people who have neither a lot of database administration background nor programming experience. Matters of creating and querying databases, and of performing simple and advanced operations with PHP scripting, are covered adroitly.