Product DescriptionBeginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition covers every step of the design and building process involved in creating powerful, extendable e–commerce web sites. Based around a real–world example involving a web site selling t–shirts, you’ll learn how to create and manage a product catalog, build and integrate a shopping cart, and process customer accounts and PayPal/credit card transactions. With the e–commerce framework in place, authors Emilian Balanescu and Cristian Darie show you how to integrate advanced features sure to set your web site apart from the competition. You’ll learn how to expand your catalog using Amazon Web Services, optimize the web site for the search engines, and take advantage of Ajax to build an even more user–friendly shopping cart. Other highlights: The authors show you how to build a complex, extendable e–commerce web site using sound development practi. . . More >>
Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition
Buyer beware! There is no help for this book. Downloads (code) does not work. Email messages to authors help links are not answered.
I have read and used many books about PHP and MYSQL, this one is impossible to get through the 3d Chapter successfully.
Rating: 1 / 5
The authors know professional coding practices and they take you by the hand so you do the right thing. You get exposure to Smarty code templates and Yahoo web development libraries — this is good stuff, and it’s exactly what you should be doing in the real world as a professional. Unfortunately, if you’re following along with the exercises, their code is replete with errors. I mean, everything has bugs in it. The CSS, the SQL stored procedures, the PHP, everything. So you have to spend a lot of time figuring out what went wrong. This is realistic; it’s what would happen to you if you started a job and immediately had to know PHP, especially if you got put onto an existing project where the person writing it was a sloppy hack who never tested. But it would be nice if you could spend all your time debugging YOUR OWN code instead of the AUTHORS’ code. If you were to say OK, let’s just download the code and see it running the way it’s supposed to, the source code is MUCH CHANGED from whatever is in the book (so you can’t really follow the examples anymore) and it STILL doesn’t run. I know these guys are good engineers because they understand what they’re doing and they explain it pretty well. But man, they are wasting so much of my time! I would trash the book even more if the other book I got wasn’t worse.
Rating: 2 / 5
There are code errors not listed in the Errata, a time wasting nightmare. Apress should put up a serious help site or withdraw the book
Rating: 1 / 5
Be very careful with this book if you are on a windows based machine. There is a PHP bug noted on page 150. Unfortunately, no reliable fix or work around is noted anywhere. The fix noted on the errata sheet does not help the matter. Furthermore, there are many forums discussing the problem, but none of them offer a viable solution. The book could be worth four stars if this problem were actually addressed. The author new about the problem, but failed to offer a viable solution to people working on a windows based machine. All they had to do was create a different approach to making multiple queries to the database. What a disappointment.
Rating: 1 / 5
I can’t speak highly enough of this book, but be sure you are buying it for the rights reasons. Here’s why:
I have good knowledge of HTML and CSS, but I know very little about PHP, SQL, and MySQL. I want to start an online store, and HTML and CSS just won’t cut it. I knew from the beginning I would need to learn PHP, and likely JavaScript to create a functioning store.
HOWEVER: This book does not teach you PHP. It does not teach you JavaScript, or SQL, MySQL, AJAX, or any programming language at all. Are we clear on that? Good.
Now that that is settled, let’s see why this book really shines!
This book is about e-commerce. It is a tutorial, and it leads you step-by-step through creating an online store that is fully-functional, secure, and flexible. If you do all the steps, you end up with a complete store. Oh, wait, did I say IF you do all the steps? Actually, no. You can cut and paste the code as you go, if you want, although you would learn less that way. Either way, you need to be thorough. Programming is not for the sloppy, impatient, or anyone with the “that’s close enough” mentality. You must follow the instructions meticulously, and you will have to track down every typo. There will be some troubleshooting involved, but I figured it out, and I don’t know PHP, like I said earlier.
So, if the code is available for download at the author’s website . . . why get the book at all? Well, because if you want to learn how it all works together, how to customize it without breaking it, how to improve or adapt it, and why it is set up the way it is–then you need to read the book. It is easy enough to read and understand, even without much knowledge of PHP.
I found this book to be perfect, because it is exactly what I needed: a tutorial for creating a fully-functional, secure, and flexible store.
So is this book for raw beginners? No. You should have enough experience with webpages to comprehend HTML and CSS, minimally. Experience with programming is a help, but not necessary.
So is this book for intermediate web designers? Absolutely!
How about advanced designers . . . well, I’m not qualified to answer that. But I can tell you the authors of this book have very sound logic when it comes to the architecture of an online store. I imagine it would be beneficial to all but the most experienced designers.
Bottomline?
I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK FOR ANYONE DESIGNING AN ONLINE STORE.
Rating: 5 / 5