Amazon.com (ISBN 0764535374, Paperback)

How could the combination of PHP and MySQL--which is feature-rich, highly reliable combination, capable of dealing with large traffic volumes, and absolutely free of charge in most cases--be any better? In MySQL/PHP Database Applications, Jay Greenspan and Brad Bulger explain how to work with the capable pair, primarily for applications you might use on a Web site. If you take the time to study the advice and work through your own tests of the concepts presented, it's pretty much certain that you'll walk away with the knowledge you need to do serious development work with the PHP scripting language and the MySQL database server.

Rather than make up trivial programs just to illustrate aspects of the MySQL/PHP environment, this book features code snippets, each half a page or so in length, that illustrate the behavior of key code structures. For example, in explaining conditional statements in PHP, the book gives you a no-frills IF statement with real values in place. It's not always obvious how the code structures will behave in practice, but the book does a consistently good job of commenting intelligently on the place of each aspect of the language in a well-designed application. The latter half of the book attacks specific problems--a chat system, a guest book, and so on--and walks through the setup of MySQL and each important PHP function for each. --David Wall

Topics covered: The PHP server-side scripting language and the MySQL database server, explained for people who have neither a lot of database administration background nor programming experience. Matters of creating and querying databases, and of performing simple and advanced operations with PHP scripting, are covered adroitly.