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Practical PHP and MySQL website databases : a simplified approach
West A., Apress, Berkeley, CA, 2013. 448 pp. Type: Book (978-1-430260-76-9)
Date Reviewed: Oct 28 2014

The purpose of this book is not evident from the title, so let’s omit some of the less useful words and add some more useful ones. What we get: “Building database-driven websites with PHP and MySQL.” After reading this book and experimenting with the numerous example files provided on the Apress website (http://www.apress.com/9781430260769), readers should be able to build a new website that relies on a database of registered users and a catalog of products. Will it be so simple, and will the book provide enough information for that? Obviously, some readers should manage to reach this goal, but others will encounter problems.

First of all, this book is not self-contained. It assumes, without really saying so, that the readers already know about Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and cascading style sheets (CSS), and also a little about JavaScript. Apress has published 179 books with HTML in the title, 204 with JavaScript, and 131 with PHP, so choosing among them is not easy. Admittedly, new editions of these books are included in this number, but the total is still overwhelming. Anyway, determining what previous knowledge is required is difficult, and the book does not help: in some cases it goes on at length about boring details, and in some other cases the necessary details are missing.

The introduction should help in this respect, but its main purpose seems to be to oppose the use of a content management system (CMS) for building a website. All CMSs are mocked as “paint-by-numbers” tools, although Apress publishes more than two dozen books about the three most important CMSs, Drupal, Joomla!, and WordPress.

Let’s examine the contents of the book. The first ten chapters (of 12) constitute a sequence of complete tutorials, which enrich a website from a simple interactive one that only allows users to register to something that is a first attempt at an e-commerce website.

Along with these tutorials, many useful PHP programming paradigms are presented, and since the necessary files are available on the Apress website, readers can save a lot of tedious typing and error-fixing and concentrate on the useful contents. The presentation clearly explains the cumbersome and weird programming necessary in PHP in order to build a page asking visitors to fill fields and send a request. After that, readers should understand why they must first analyze and check the contents of the form before ever displaying it. I also appreciated the good advice about the security of the website and its database.

However, this style of presentation has serious disadvantages. Since the same files are enriched from chapter to chapter, and are generally listed in full, this occasions very lengthy repetitions, which quickly become extremely boring. Worse, the general style of presentation is to first list the full file, and then list it again with interspersed comments. The book would be at least 150 pages shorter without these repetitions. More pages could be saved by omitting the parts of the files that do not change from chapter to chapter. And even more could be saved by proceeding a little faster--is it really necessary to devote a full chapter (the sixth one) to adding the phone number and the post code to the database of registered users? Still more could be saved by omitting the suggestions of user names and data, rather humorous, which are listed so many times that after several chapters the reader already knows them by heart.

The general layout of the files is not pleasant: no indentation and no attempt to make them more readable, which is especially offensive with a language as cumbersome as PHP.

Some other remarks:

  • The author’s world is clearly the United Kingdom, which is perfectly respectable, but it is also the world of Windows, without any mention of any free software, for example, LibreOffice.
  • CSS code is most often directly included in the HTML files, which would be frowned upon by most authors, as well as hard coding a bullet in the code instead of using the ul and li tags.
  • In order to avoid the accusation of gender bias, the author uses feminine pronouns for some of the actors involved in the website construction and use. But its main use of the feminine pronoun is for the vicious hacker trying to break into the website.
  • The presentation of the table of contents makes it almost unusable: each chapter contains many small sections at the same level, making it difficult to browse.
  • There are more typographical and factual errors than one would like in such a book.

To conclude, this is a useful book with a lot of information, but it is packed with too many repetitions and it would have been more pleasant to read with a more careful presentation.

More reviews about this item: Amazon

Reviewer:  O. Lecarme Review #: CR142866 (1501-0021)
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