Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites

Used Book in Good Condition

If you’re familiar with HTML, using the information in Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and CSS, you will quickly learn how to build interactive, data-driven websites with the powerful combination of PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and CSS – the top technologies for creating modern sites. This hands-on guide explains each technology separately, shows you how to combine them, and introduces valuable web programming concepts such as objects, XHTML, cookies, and session management.

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3 responses to “Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites”

Newspeak “Be great in act, as you have been i…

January 15, 2014

44 of 48 people found the following review helpful

Not for absolute beginners, but very good, September 28, 2012

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Newspeak “Be great in act, as you have been i… (Tulsa, OK) –

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This review is from: Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites (Paperback)

This is a very good resource for learning these topics. It is not for absolute beginners. You need to have a working knowledge of html and how websites work. I suggest that you should have coded a website, and reached a point where you want to do something specific, but cannot figure out how.

I have been checking out every book I can find from my library that covers PHP/MySQL, JavaScript, and HTML/CSS. My wife balked at how many books I had. It was a stack of thick dull texts LITERALLY 5 feet tall. They were all dense, boring, and assumed that I knew things that only a web developer would know. I would read a chapter or two in each before I could go no further.

Out of all of those books, this is the one book I bought.

Now, this is still a thick, dense book. The author tries his best to make the book enjoyable to read. He gives good examples, and immediately explains why he does things this way, how things might be different, what mistakes you might make, and how you would implement this new knowledge. It is this explanation that makes this book worth buying. Every other book will tell you something and move on. I assume that other authors take for granted that they know the why’s and how’s and such, that they do not want to waste time on details that seem tedious to them. This author really works hard to make the content as easy to understand as possible.

This means that there are parts I am familiar with and skip over. That is fine. For the parts I struggle with, I am very grateful to have all of the expounded information available.

I cannot speak about updates from the 1st edition, since I did not read it. I will most likely buy the next edition, if the changes/additions are substantial. I would like to see more on forms and cookies. There really is no good book about forms and cookies, and the two chapters here are very good. and I would like the “putting it all together” chapter at the end to be substantially longer. That ending chapter was my favorite part. I don’t know what else he can add to this book other than a section on html 5.

All in all, this is a great book. Buy it.

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KEES YDENBERG

January 15, 2014

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful

Thorough but accessible introductory book, December 9, 2012

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KEES YDENBERG –

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This review is from: Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites (Paperback)

I bought this book because I have been building static websites with HTML/CSS for a while and wanted to see if I could take this skill to the next level. I think this book brought me a long way towards that aim. I would recommend it to anyone who knows AT LEAST basic HTML and preferably has some programming experience as well. You don’t have to be a wiz, but it helps if you know the concepts of loops and objects in other languages.

When introducing a new language, the author tends to tell you A LOT about the syntax of the language before going into any detail about what you can do with it. The best way to read the book is to have a project in mind as you go through these chapters, and try to incorporate new concepts as they come up. Of course, this will probably make your project a mess by the time it’s done, but in the end it’s a learning exercise. The book is full of code snippets to demonstrate functionality, but a bit lacking in what I would call real-world examples (until the last chapter).

The place where this really became a problem, for me at least, was the section on JavaScript. We first spend two chapters going through the JS syntax: loops, variables, arrays, objects, if/else, on and on and on, including things you won’t necessarily need for a while like object prototypes (JS and PHP share some common ancestry and so a lot of this feels repeated). The author throws out the concept of the Document Object Model but we don’t come back to it for quite a while.

By the time we get a real-world example of where JavaScript is used in actual webpages, it’s in the context of form validation. In spite of the lengthly introduction to the language, the code presented is at first incomprehensible. A further detour through Regex is required before it starts to make sense. I thought a more basic example of things people actually use JS for, like manipulating the DOM, would have been a better place to start (and yes, I know a lot of this is done with jQuery and you don’t need to know raw JS to do it these days, but you probably should anyway).

In conclusion, I may not buy another book on PHP and MySQL for a long time. This one is thorough enough that I can find my way around and find anything else I need with online reference guides. But I think, conceptually, the JS section falls down a bit. Still, after I pick up a more basic JS guide, I’ll likely keep this one around because of level of detail it goes into.

The chapter on CSS3 was also a great way to get up to speed on the latest additions to that whole thing.

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Bob Anderson

January 15, 2014

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful

Serious improvement from the first edition, October 4, 2012

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Bob Anderson –

This review is from: Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites (Paperback)

I read the first edition of this book and at that time I didn’t like it much. Then a week ago I decided to give the second edition a try and I was pleasantly surprised to find the book much better written and much useful.
The explanations are quick and to the point and the author uses an informal tone which I like.

As a first book on all of the topics included the book will seem too short on explanations and therefore it’s not for absolute beginners in web programming. As a refresher or complimentary reading the book is great.

If you are an absolute beginner I’d suggest Larry Ullman’s books because the tempo and the learning curve are lower in his introductory books.

One last important thing – the last chapter of the book is devoted to the practical application of all the topics covered and a full working example of dynamic website creation is given.

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