PHP & MySQL: Novice to Ninja: Get Up to Speed With PHP the Easy Way

It's this book's fault that made me think that I could get into web development. They left out the chapter on "How to deal with the chronic headaches that come with it". Still awesome.

waste of money I wanted to learn php and mysql not some unsupported virtual box system that won't work on any of my systems .after a sleepless night maybe it will work as a doorstop.

Full disclosure: As a graphic designer I did a few web sites back in the early 2000's and an earlier edition of this book was my guide. It was great. A few years later I stopped web development and more or less walked away from web-based design. I have returned and found that development practices are now *VERY* different. I consider myself an intermediate level coder and know a decent amount about file structures, terminal commands, etc. I'm not a newb, but I'm no pro either.In the "old days", you installed a LAMP or a WAMP (XAMPP, MAMP, etc) , fired up a text editor and went at it. Now, it appears you start by installing all sorts of things via the command line or Terminal, without any clear idea 1) where things are being installed, 2) why they're needed, 3) what they do, 4) how they alter PATH, environment variables, system variables, etc.This relatively new development practice is a colossal problem for new designers and developers, because of all the attendant 'dependencies' libraries, etc that these 'package managers' require. You can spend DAYS trying to figure out why something doesn't work and the Internet is quite useless when you have no idea what questions to ask, because you don't know what has broken where or why.I still haven't gotten a reasonable explanation for why web development has progressed along this path from my far more experienced developer/programmer friends, other than a shrug of the shoulders and an indifferent, 'that's just how it is...'. One friend, - who has worked in a very high level capacity for EA and other large corporate entities and is a truly accomplished professional programmer, mentioned that on one recent install he'd done of a 'virtual environment', he found over 42,000 files had been installed.Forty two thousand files.... and he has no idea what they're all for...And this guy makes a good six figure salary as a programmer!What has this got to do with this book?Well, I've done a lot of the work in the book by *ignoring the setup instructions in the first few chapters* (install Git, Virtual Box, Vagrant, etc) and instead used MAMP , then saved my files into the relevant directories (htdocs).Everything works great if you do it this way and the authors should be highly commended for using best practices in their coding. They are scrupulous about security issues and separating code from markup. Everything is up-to-date and constitutes what is probably the overview of how to approach serious, professional-level php development in coding and programming I have seen.But...I have gone back and tried to install the virtual environment the authors suggested - using Git, VirtualBox and Vagrant. I did this because it's how the 'pro's do it.' ** But it doesn't work **. I'm getting a 403 error when I attempt to load the index.html page, which almost certainly means there's a permission problem somewhere. But the gist of the issue is that no reasonable person can afford to 'learn' anything when they don't have the resources necessary to learn. Telling someone they're going to learn physics, 'so take out your particle accelerator' is ridiculous. I don't have the time or patience to learn why Vagrant or VirtualBox or Git isn't working - i"m supposed to be learning PHP, right?Esoteric warnings and error messages in Terminal mean nothing to me without knowing far more than I do now. And going online to discover the source of one problem just leads me down a rabbit hole of 'do this', 'type that',' change permissions on this', reinstall this, nano your bash, bla bla bla. Add in the fact that many people offering advice or asking questions on Stack Overflow don't mention version numbers and you discover that 'solving' a 'small' problem becomes a multi-day exercise in futility and frustration.I *know* I am not alone in the frustration that newbies will feel when this happens. I would suggest that aspiring PHP developers SKIP THE CHAPTER ON INSTALLING A VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT. AND STICK TO USING A LAMP OR WAMP.I would also suggest some 'pro' level developer write a book for newbies on how all these package managers, etc work and *why* they're a necessity. I don't think they are. (And I know I'm not alone ...) I think they're just a way of introducing complexity to managing TEXT FILES (!) so these people can justify their jobs.So, for potential purchasers (or newbie developers) :1) Ignore the virtual environment stuff at the beginning of the book. Or try it, and when or if it doesn't do what its supposed to do, just install MAMP or another LAMP/WAMP and keep progressing through the book. You will be richly rewarded with up-to-date practices and excellent advice on building apps with PHP. Do not get bogged down trying to figure out why your 'virtual environment isn't working'. You are learning PHP, not how to troubleshoot terminal-based package-manager installs. Try it once, then move on to the rest of the book.This book is a top-notch guide to PHP development. 5 stars for that.2) Buy Post-It Notes. You will need these because the book (rather inexcusably) does not have an index. I really don't understand why they didn't include one. MINUS 1/2 star3) The style is different and takes some getting used to. There's a fair amount of back and forth, which is a good method, but probably not to everyone's tastes. Also, there's quite a bit of the same code over and over with only slight changes. They could probably have saved about 30-40 pages by not reproducing the same code. This takes some getting used to. MINUS 1/2 starConclusion: This is the best current book on web development with PHP. It uses current and professional level methods of programming and does a fair to good job of telling readers why they should develop in a particular way. The lack of an index is strange (but Post Its!) and the style of progression through the book can seem scattered, but there's a definite method to this approach that can truly take you to the next level of development. Highly recommended with a few caveats.

As a professional PHP programmer for almost a decade, I can't believe that this 6th edition has such a low rating. I read it in PDF format with my Sitepoint account and found out that its content is relevant and very close to the daily workflow of a PHP expert. I read it because I wanted a beginner PHP/MySQL book to train my colleague. If you are new to backend developement in PHP/MySQL then this may be your first book. In my opinion, Tom Butler did a good job. Read it carefully, you will not be disappointed.Note: I don't own a physical copy so my rating is for the content of the book :)

No supported code sample repository.With commonly accepted practice for authors to set a code samples online and with kindle blocking the text copying, my purchase was a rip-off.

Not a good book for learning PHP. On top of that, the book does not even have an index!

This book is great for someone who's just a little more advanced than a beginner. The book takes you through a web project and has you constantly refactoring your code as you go along and learn how to take on new features or better ways of doing something you did before. I feel like I've learned a lot, even though I already know a decent amount object-oriented PHP and can connect to MySQL that way, but unfortunately have yet to structure my code that way yet, as I haven't yet gotten to those chapters (I'm sure that'll be a later refactoring exercise).A lot of the reviews are giving it one star because they hate the development environment (Virtualbox, Vagrant, Git) and think its pointless, which isn't really fair. Sure, if you just want to make one website for fun then it probably isn't worth it to set up the whole environment in this book, and instead just go with a WAMP or LAMP stack. However, if you want to be paid to be a web developer there's lots of good reasons, such as parity between your development server and production server, multiple sites you're developing at the same time making a mess of files on a local XAMP stack, etc. A separate book was was written for this subject, called Jump Start PHP Environment by Bruno Skvorc, which describes the exact environment used in this book, how to set it up, and exactly why each part is important. If you plan on making web development a career I would definitely recommend reading that book first, and them coming to this one. Sure, I faced a few hurdles the first few times I had to install the environment. It took me a few days, I got a little frustrated at times, but it's nothing that can't be solved unless you're a complete beginner, or just like to give up.I'm giving it 4 stars instead of 5 because this book has way too many typos, or places where the example doesn't 100% fully match what the book says. These are easy enough to spot and figure out (much easier than setting up a dev environment for the very first time), but can be annoying to look at after awhile. If someone proofreads the next version of this book, I'd definitely give it 5 stars.

Ottimo libro, spiegazione eccezionale

Book arrived before expected delivery date - that is nice, but book looks like manufacturing defect with some leftover of extra pages glued just under soft cover and next few pages printed at an angle (it does not look like any content is missing though).Overall: good delivery, poor quality product.

It's a good reference on the subject of using mysql with php. I dont know if it's going to make you a "Ninja" on the subject.

Easy to read and understand programming book, Really enjoyed reading it, but the screenshot are completely unreadable, the book is only in black and white which can make it dull to read and feels like a old style coding book.