PHP and MySQL Web Development 4th Edition - Luke Welling & Laura...

Why You Should Read This Book tThis book will teach you how to create interactive websites from the simplest order form through to complex, secure e-commerce sites or interactive Web 2.0 sites.What’s more, you’ll learn how to do it using open source technologies. tThis book is aimed at readers who already know at least the basics of HTML and have done some programming in a modern programming language before but have not necessarily programmed for the Internet or used a relational database. If you are a beginning programmer, you should still find this book useful, but digesting it might take a little longer.We’ve tried not to leave out any basic concepts, but we do cover them at speed.The typical readers of this book want to master PHP and MySQL for the purpose of building a large or commercial website.You might already be working in another web development language; if so, this book should get you up to speed quickly. tWe wrote the first edition of this book because were tired of finding PHP books that were basically function references.These books are useful, but they don’t help when your boss or client has said,“Go build me a shopping cart.” In this book, we have done our best to make every example useful.You can use many of the code samples directly in your website, and you can use many others with only minor modifications. What You Will Learn from This Book tReading this book will enable you to build real-world, dynamic websites. If you’ve built websites using plain HTML, you realize the limitations of this approach. Static content from a pure HTML website is just that—static. It stays the same unless you physically update it.Your users can’t interact with the site in any meaningful fashion. tUsing a language such as PHP and a database such as MySQL allows you to make your sites dynamic: to have them be customizable and contain real-time information. tWe have deliberately focused this book on real-world applications, even in the introductory chapters.We begin by looking at a simple online ordering system and work our way through the various parts of PHP and MySQL. tWe then discuss aspects of electronic commerce and security as they relate to building a real-world website and show you how to implement these aspects in PHP and MySQL. tIn the final part of this book, we describe how to approach real-world projects and take you through the design, planning, and building of the following projects: tUser authentication and personalization tShopping carts tWeb-based email tMailing list managers tWeb forums tPDF document generation tWeb services with XML and SOAP tWeb 2.0 application with Ajax tYou should be able to use any of these projects as is, or you can modify them to suit your needs.We chose them because we believe they represent some the most common web-based applications built by programmers. If your needs are different, this book should help you along the way to achieving your goals.