* Demonstrates Web application development by presenting ten real, ready-to-use examples * Samples start with a simple guess book and end with a fully-functional e-commerce site with a shopping cart * New features include both MySQL 4.1 and PHP 4.2 * Latest edition contains new applications including log analysis and project tracking * CD-ROM includes all the code and examples applications from the book in addition to MySQL, PHP, Apache, PHP classes, libraries, utilities, and other tools

In MySQL/PHP Database Applications, Jay Greenspan and Brad Bulger explain how to work with PHP and MySQL, primarily for applications you might use on a Web site. How could the combination of this capable pair--which is feature-rich, highly reliable, capable of dealing with large traffic volumes, and absolutely free of charge in most cases--be any better? Take the time to study the advice and work through your own tests of the concepts presented, and 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, half a page or so in length each, which illustrate the behaviour 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 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.