Head First PHP & MySQL (A Brain-Friendly Guide)

Head First PHP&MySQL (A Brain-Friendly Guide)
By Lynn Beighley, Michael Morrison

Publisher: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Number Of Pages: 812
Publication Date: 2008-12-30
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0596006306
ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780596006303

Product Description:

If you’re ready to create web pages more complex than those you can build with HTML and CSS, Head First PHP & MySQL is the ultimate learning guide to building dynamic, database-driven websites using PHP and MySQL. Packed with real-world examples, this book teaches you all the essentials of server-side programming, from the fundamentals of PHP and MySQL coding to advanced topics such as form validation, session IDs, cookies, database queries and joins, file I/O operations, content management, and more.

Head First PHP & MySQL offers the same visually rich format that’s turned every title in the Head First series into a bestseller, with plenty of exercises, quizzes, puzzles, and other interactive features to help you retain what you’ve learned.

Use PHP to transform static HTML pages into dynamic web sites
Create and populate your own MySQL database tables, and work with data stored in files
Perform sophisticated MySQL queries with joins, and refine your results with LIMIT and ORDER BY
Use cookies and sessions to track visitors’ login information and personalize the site for users
Protect your data from SQL injection attacks
Use regular expressions to validate information on forms
Dynamically display text based on session info and create images on the fly
Pull syndicated data from other sites using PHP and XML
Throughout the book, you’ll build sophisticated examples — including a mailing list, a job board, and an online dating site — to help you learn how to harness the power of PHP and MySQL in a variety of contexts. If you’re ready to build a truly dynamic website, Head First PHP & MySQL is the ideal way to get going.

Summary: Heads First PHP & MySQL is the way to get started!
Rating: 5

I’ve been a big fan of the Heads First series for a long time. The format of the Head First books is unique, engaging and effective. One could consider the Head First series to be comic book like. This is one of the series’ great virtues. The interactive layout and thoughtful way illustrations are integrated to text in order to explain ‘hard to get concepts’ really works.

I use the series to learn and teach advanced programming topics. All the exciting things about the Heads First series shines through in PHP & MySQL.

Heads First PHP & MySQL is for beginners. There is little prerequisite knowledge required to get benefit from the book. I have learned from years of teaching and mentoring that beginners learn best when presented with information in a way that is fun and hands on. Heads First PHP & MySQL meets this requirement with no problem.

The book covers the range of topics that is standard for having a good foundation in programming in general and programming in PHP in particular. After finishing this book the reader will be able to create a data driven web site in PHP, leveraging that special relationship between the PHP programming language and the MySQL database. The reader will know why and how PHP and MySQL go hand in hand.

The book throws in some extra tidbits. For example it teaches you how to make a data drive Rss Feed. It’s a good example that has real world bearing.

Again, this is a beginners book. I caution ‘bosses’ that while giving this book to aspiring PHP developers is a good thing to do, you should not think that the book will create production ready coders. Coding in a production environment requires experience that is beyond the scope of this work.

This being said, I look forward to reading an follow up volume to this work titled, Heads First Really Programming in PHP and MySQL in which the topics of object oriented programming in PHP and implementing the basic software design patterns are explained in a way that only a Heads First book could.

Heads First PHP and MySQL is a great beginners book, one that should be on the bookshelf of every up and coming PHP developer.

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