Book Review : PHP and MySQL by Example.

Earlier, I posted a sample chapter of PHP and MySQL by Example written by Ellie Quigley with Marko Gargenta. Now I’d like to take a few minutes to do a fly-by of the entire book.

Amazon’s page for this book has this to say about Ellie Quigley.

Ellie Quigley has taught scripting languages in Silicon Valley for more than twenty years. Her Perl and shell programming classes at the University of Santa Cruz Extension program have become part of Silicon Valley lore. Her best-selling books include UNIX Shells by Example, Fourth Edition; Perl by Example, Third Edition; and JavaScript by Example, all from Prentice Hall.

As usual with programming books, we start with a history of the Internet. Well maybe not the entire Internet, I don’t think they go back to DARPA, instead Ellie starts with a history of the web. This is one of the few cases where I don’t really mind it because the book is targeting beginner programmers. Ellie takes her readers through the briefest of histories so that at the end of Chapter 1, everybody knows where we came from, how we got there and what some of our community luminaries look like when sketched during an earthquake. (The little caricatures really are cute in a “Who is that” kind of way)

Chapter 2 continues laying the groundwork for readers who are new to the concepts of programming or web based development. There’s nothing new and earth shattering in the beginning two chapters for anyone with any amount of programming experience. However, if you have a friend, a niece or a co-worker who wants to know more about programming, this is a great place to point them.

While I won’t go through each chapter’s contents individually, Chapter 3 merits special attention. Unlike the first two, chapters, Chapter 3 is targeted at programmers who just want the details on PHP. It gives a great overview of the language syntax and constructs. If you don’t need to be taught what an array or a boolean is, you just want to know what they look like in PHP, this is a great starting point. it’s short and to the point and covered everything from variable types to OO syntax. It’s not going to help you get Zend Certified but it will get you jump-started on your road to PHP.

The rest of the book covers topics you would expect form a book of this title. It walks you through the basics and into the more difficult concepts, hand-holding you each step of the way without being condescending. Each chapter is sprinkled liberally with sample code that is accompanied by detailed, line-by-line explanations of what the code does and images showing the output when appropriate.

To give you an example of how encompassing this book is, here is a chapter list.

1. Introduction
2. Getting Started
3. PHP Quick Start (This is one of my favorite chapters)
4. The Building Blocks: Data Types, Literals, Variables and Constants
5. Operators
6. Strings
7. Conditionals and Loops
8. Arrays
9. User-Defined Functions
10. More on PHP Forms
11. Files and Directories
12. Regular Expressions and Pattern Matching
13. Introduction to MySQL
14. SQL Language Tutorial
15. PHP and MySQL Integration
16. Cookies and Sessions
17. Objects

Additionally there are five Appendix, one that covers a project you can build using your newly acquired knowledge and the other 4 are specific topics that the author felt needed further attention. Topics like mail, debugging and Security.

This book is like many others on the shelfs of bookstores across the country in that it covers the basics of what you need to know to get started programming in PHP. However, unlike other books in this genre, PHP and MySQL by Example has an different feel to it. It’s obvious from the beginning pages that Ellie Quigley knows PHP and programming as well as anyone I’ve met. She also knows how to teach. From the topics selected to the sample code given, it’s obvious that this book was written by someone who is no stranger to teaching.

So what is the downside to this book? Well, it’s hard to find one. Yes, it does start out with the obligatory “History of everything” chapter but in this book, it would almost be wrong not to have it. The book is long but there are no wasted chapters or pages full of screen shots of the MySQL installer. The sample code does not stitch together into a cool application you can play with but there is one in the back that you can build. I’m really struggling with a downside to this book. I guess if I had to pick one thing it would be that it’s a paperback book and a volume of this quality deserves a hardback. There I said it, and I’ll stand by it.

So my recommendation is this. If you are new to programming or new to PHP, this is a good book to have. Run don’t walk to your bookstore and get a copy. Go ahead and wrap the cover in duck tape because you will use it so much, you’ll probably wear it out. If you have experience in programming, you’ll want to pass though, there’s just not enough there to make it worth while. (Honestly, your not the target for the book anyhow) It would however, make a great gift for someone who is just starting down the programming path.

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