PHP and MySQL Web Development - Second Edition by Luke Welling & Laura Thomson

Published by Sams Publishing.

I got this book in the mail, opened it up with every intention to dig in and read away, but ended up not even being able to read until the following day.. Why? To my suprise, my review from the 1st edition was printed inside the cover! :-D I was to excited to read, and had to pretend I was a celebrity for the remainder of the evening.

Eventually, I got off my head trip and got to reading.

This new edition of the book is every bit as good as the previous and more, it will get you up to date with the latest PHP standards while following along with a wide variety of "projects you can actually use." Just as before, this book covers practically everything PHP: commonly used functions, regular expressions, object orientation, database design & integration, security, sessions, e-commerce, project management, useful libraries (image manipulation, pdf files) etc etc.. The code examples include a shopping cart, web forums, content management, e-mail related services, creating a site with membership, and it doesn't stop there - the book is just cram-packed full of information.

Any serious PHP web developer should own this book, it opens you up to whole new world of development by relating concepts of software engineering (believe it or not) - in simplified explanations.

So what's new? The PHP code and descriptions have been updated, the variety of web resources has grown, did I mention that my name was published in the book? :-D The most noticable change of all, is the addition of a new chapter which touches base with XML and SOAP. It's very hard to find good PHP books these days (at least where I've been looking) and this is one of em, no complaints :-)

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