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Books on PHP and Mysql

Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 10:52 am
by mohson
Ive decided that enough is enough and I cant keep relying on this site to help me get through my project I need to develope some serious skills now could any of you suggest some decent books that I could use im told I should get 1 or two general web application books and a php reference manual aswell, what do you think about this?

Ive more or less got the mysql stuff sorted but I am not a hardcore programmer - I intend to develop in this scripting language though.

Ok a few questions how much does it matter what version of php I use is there that much of a difference between versions

alot of the time I have been referred to functions that are readily available or that people have created - what I dont understand is that if a certain function does something that you want to do then why dont people just create there applications based on a bunch of pre defined functions why do you have to always develop from scratch.

for example when I was trying to do pagination someone just told me to use a certain function in php which does it for you with no hassle - I hope you understand what I mean.


Anyway any general advice and guidance would be much appreciated.

Downloading software to do PHP

Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 10:56 am
by mohson
Ok currently I am using my University server to do all my scripting which means I dont really need to worry about technical aspects of downloading the software. I think to advance my knowledge further I should download the things I need at home to allow me to work from there also.

where would I go to get started with php what would I need to download and where from - I have information on what do to once I have the server and apache but where do I go to download these.

Again any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 1:23 pm
by Chris Corbyn
Isn't Google brilliant? !!!! :lol:

Apache HTTP sever: http://www.apache.org/
PHP Hypertext preprocessor: http://www.php.net/ (You should know that by now)
MySQL server & Clients: http://www.mysql.com/

As far as books go.....

PHP reference material... don't buy a book for reference, there's nothing better than the manual provided by the people who made it at http://www.php.net

MySQL (I have a 'visual quickpro guide' book by Larry Ullman (ISBN: 0321186486) and I haven't read any others but it helped me a lot. MySQL functions are all reference on http://www.mysql.com/ too just like php.net.

As far as variations with versions of PHP goes, yes there can be big differences depending upon what you are doing. Pre PHP3 is a far cry from PHP4 and superglobal usage has changed over time. PHP5 introduces many new functions not seen in version 4 but not many hosts are running it as yet. :wink:

any other books

Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 2:01 pm
by mohson
any other books anyone?? what about building mysql and php web applications by Kevin Yank anyone used that or any other good books???

Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 2:20 pm
by infolock

Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 2:23 pm
by Burrito
I think as d11 put it, you're not going to find anything much better at explaining php as the manual. You can always d/l the manual in a .chm and keep it on your desktop so it's readily available w/o you being online.

If you want a book to help you with conceptual design I'm sure there are millions from which to choose...check out amazon or google for one.

I'm not passing judgement one way or the other about your experience on this forum, but in all honesty, you're not going to find a better resource for php development than where you are right now.

Burr