A Damn Good PHP Book: PHP and MySQL Web Development

Man it took forever and a day to find, but I finally found a damn good PHP book! Not only, good, great.  PHP and MySQL Web Development, from the SAMS Publishing Developer’s Library division, by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson. It’s one of those purple books. It is big and thick and not cheap, but worth every penny. These two actively make an effort to use proper HTML where appropriate and note that it is abbreviated to focus on the PHP stuff.

They’ve also gone the extra mile in planning and structuring this book. Moves a bit quickly, but doesn’t leave out anything to get the overall scheme of things into your brain in nice chunks and logical building blocks. They don’t leave you wondering, “What the hell is that function?” or anything like that. They explain the points as they come up, and are careful not to go over your head while also not leaving out important stuff. Your understanding of PHP is blasted into motion and that’s not even saying anything about the MySQL portion!

The only caveat is: YES, you do need to know HTML (xhtml is better, since you’ll be dealing with a database and eventually using xml anyways if you know what’s good for you!) and CSS. It also is best if you’ve experienced some beginning programming book somewhere before… particularly, if you’ve learned basic C programming, PHP is gonna be cinch. But you should already have some idea what arrays and loops are. (if you haven’t already, take the time to get old Dan Gookin’s C All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies and you’ll be in tip top shape in no time, with a head full of how programming concepts work.)

One other thing of course, if you’re learning it, it may be a bit much for many folks to try and test your PHP and web pages at home. A cheap solution is to click on the link at the bottom of my blog… Yes, that’s right, a cheap, but good web hosting service that allows you to use all the scripting and ssh and ftp you can muster.

If you purchase no other PHP book, buy this one!