Building Database Applications on the Web Using PHP 3, w. CD-ROM [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

The book then offers a few applications which are dominated by poor editing. Making it more work to search out the minor syntax errors then just to write something better oneself...

I really can find no redeeming qualities to this book at all.

First of all, the book is too Linux focussed. Although I do happen to use Linux, those who are trying to learn PHP on Windows NT will find that some of the examples are invalid on NT.

Second, if you don't already have a pretty good grasp on programming, you are going to get lost pretty quickly (despite the authors claims that you don't need to be a programmer). This book shows coding examples and uses terms that the average person is not going to be familiar with. Terms and concepts are introduced, and either not explained at all, or given a quick once over that is not nearly suficiant. Because of this, this book will not teach you PHP.

This book will not teach you SQL either, and the sample applications in the tutorial will not work unless you already know how to add users and grant permissions in PostGreSQL or whatever other database you use (and you can forget about logging into their website like they suggest. Apparently they had a hard drive crash and still have not gotten that part back up).

Even if you do know how to set up your SQL db properly, almost none of the sample applications in the tutorial will work anyway because almost all of them contain coding errors and syntax errors serious enough to prevent the application from running at all. Some of the applications contain multiple errors. Didn't the authors even bother to try running these applications to check for errors before including them in the manuscript? I had to find and fix the errors in almost every single tutorial application before they would work properly. There aren't even any corrections to the code on the website for the book! And by now the authors have to know that most of their samples contain errors. Are they just to lazy to put corrected examples on their web site?

The Troubleshooting paragraph at the end of each application is useless. They say "We have tried to isolate a few of the common errors we've seen..", and then don't give any explination of these common errors. It is simply a cut and paste from one application to another - The exact same paragraph at the end of each application. When things don't work, this paragraph is useless because it claims you typed in the code wrong or don't have the database set up correctly.. The reality is that things don't work because the authors typed in the code wrong, and the code samples you have are useless as they will not even run.

It also seems the authors don't even understand HTML much less PHP. For example, they include illegal HTML comments in some samples, enclose samples in PHP tags when they should not be in PHP tags (in fact the PHP tags cause the sample to break), use checkboxes when radio buttons should be used instead, insert useless tables that serve no purpose (cause they only have one row and one column and use line breaks and paragraph breaks to seperate lines, making the table serve no purpose at all.

If on the other hand you already know all of the above topics pretty well (SQL, PHP, and HTML), this book is not going to teach you anything new, and would still be a waste of money. So this book is useless to the novice and also useless to the experienced user.

Stay away from this book. Spend your money on something useful instead.

There is a "private" web site -- Addison-Wesley advertises this as an incentive on the back of the book. However, the web site, at least recently, has included nothing more than additional freely and easily obtainable information. The code and "examples" are "coming."

To top it off, email sent to the webmaster (the only contact link on the site) gets rejected by their mail server.

Addison-Wesley should be ashamed of this.

If you're a beginner, get PHP Essentials by Julie C. Meloni instead. No, I don't know her; it's just a great book, and her web site does have the code and further examples.