Robin Nixon

A nice introduction to the basics of dynamic web development including essentials in PHP, MySQL databases and scripting with JavaScript. Everything is explained in quite a lot of detail and no prior knowledge of programming is assumed (although it is good to be familiar with the web basics such as HTML).

However I feel like the usefulness of this book is somewhat limited as it is improbable that a reader would be using pure PHP and SQL in a real-life situation to come up with a dynamic web page - rather most likely these would be used within the context of a framework or a CMS. I think it would have benefitted the book if the author explained how these concepts could be used to create a dynamic framework and gave some suggestions of frameworks to look into. The book is good for understanding the bare bones of classic dynamic websites though.

The CSS section seems to be bolted on for the sake of completeness and I don't fully understand the need for it in the context of this book. This information does not add anything essential to the concepts of dynamic web pages and it could be easily obtained elsewhere.

At the end of the book there is a chapter which ties in all the covered material together in a final project.… (more)