PHP & MySQL for Dummies, by Janet Valde

As our site has grown, we have increasingly found that we need to organize it better. So we turned once again to our trusted "for Dummies"-series to search for answers about how to better organize our materials. And were yet again pleased!

PHP & MySQL for Dummies covers the basic material about using PHP and MySQL. PHP is a pain to work with for non-programmers like us, but with this book the pain at least becomes tolerable. The same goes for MySQL.

PHP & MySQL for Dummies covers the basics as far as setting up your work environment, installing PHP and MySQL, organizing your data bases, putting stuff into databases, and getting it out again, is concerned. The focus, however, is on databases and database management, so the amount of PHP explained in the book is fairly limited, although sufficient for the purposes of the tasks in the book. But you do learn basic stuff like conditionals, sorting, arrays, loops, and the like.

We like PHP & MySQL for Dummies a lot. It gave us most of the answers we wanted. The one thing we lacked a little, was a good discussion of when to use which alternative, e.g. when to make do with xml, when to use lighter and easier to use databases than MySQL, and so on. Some guidance to making the right choises in setting up data bases, in other words.

But apart from minor issues like that with the book, PHP & MySQL for Dummies does give the basics in an instructive manner. We recommend it as a first introduction to PHP and databases.

Here are a couple of other, related books that you may want to have a look at: