Somewhat Sluggish

Here is, in my opinion, the way this book should be used.

First, learn very basic PHP from [...]

Make a few sample pages for yourself using as many techniques on the site as you can. After that, make your way to the book. Up until page 134, it's just dry syntax. You can learn dry syntax much faster from the website I listed. You'll be able to skim across the first 134 pages with your knowledge, and since it will look somewhat familiar, you won't get bored out of your mind.

When you start actually getting in to mysql implementation, you can start reading the page over.

I highly suggest that you read along and make your own project that you will find interesting instead of the project provided. I'm using this book to make an inventory application for a pretend game store website, and it's keeping me much more interested than when I was making the winestore example.

Some of the functions don't work, such as the selectDistinct, but I didn't find that too annoying. The book uses some outdated techniques such as ereg for regular expressions, but that's because the book itself is slightly outdated.

Don't try to read the book cover to cover and then try to go apply what you learned. You'll just end up having to read the book again. Digest the book in chunks and actually CREATE something with it!

One final word: Do NOT attempt to install Apache, PHP, and MySQL using the book. I lost so many hours that way. Just look up some forum posts on how to do it manually using the zip files as opposed to the MSI installer.

Other Reviews

• Somewhat Sluggish
• A straight-forward made-easy presentation