Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL (Voices That Matter)

Early in this book the author suggests that an already established deep understanding of PHP, Javascript and MySQL will be required to work with this book. Fair enough. However, it would be good to put that on the cover instead of "Effortless."I've got some PHP and Javascript chops. I've working on the web at various depths for over 15 years. However, I don't drink and breathe PHP, Javascript and MySQL. I found this book often just took off without me.There are coding books that provide a background and an overview to provide a base from which one can work. This book certainly is not that. Another good kind of programming book provides sort of modular cookbook recipes, which can be used to learn, and also to do something useful, to establish flexible building blocks of expertise that can be applied to various problems. This book isn't quite that either.The chapters of the book go through very detailed, specific setups, without any flexibility built in. If you know what he's doing, you can follow along.This book is for people who already know how to do the things it describes quite well. It is not for people who want to learn, explore, or do something besides the very specific scenarios it details. It is not for people who think, "I sort of know how to do this, but I want to do something a little different from his example; maybe this book will help me understand."The author has a support site, and he seems to generously be present and helpful there. I think the time and money I spent on this book was perhaps not the best investment in solving the problems I had, but someone else might click with it better.

This book is not for beginners. I have four years of software development experience with Java, and have spent two days trying to make the downloaded code for the second project function minimally just to be able to see the flow and wiring of the example. It doesn't yet function past displaying a static index page. The online support for the book is a joke - it consists of an administrator asking "what do you mean, it doesn't work?" and the customer re-describing the problem in detail to no avail. The book's description of the pieces of the project and how they fit together is fragmented and high-level. Definitely not step-by-step. The author himself repeats throughout the book that it is not a tool to be used for learning PHP. My lack of experience in PHP is a factor in my struggle to use the book's code, but in my experience there are few things as frustrating as taking the time to put into place a "working" project that's been provided and finding that major Frankencoding has to be done and several days of struggle with forums and SO have to pass in order to get the project to limp forward...if it does at all. Next time I'm looking for a tutorial, I will pass on Mr. Ullman's offerings.

I'm working on starting my own chocolate webshop, but where to start i had some experience in designing and coding but never ever made a webshop before with great security, catalogs and a great login area.Until i found this book it was great, i have read it all. I'm dutch but i didn't need a dictionary to understand this book it helps tho if you know coding it reads easier but is not entirely necessary. The way Larry talks about php and mysql is easy to read and understand.And thanks to him i will launch a great Chocolate Webshop in 2015!A little word in dutch:Dit boek is geweldig en zeker een aanrader voor iedereen die een webshop wil maken. Het is makkelijk te lezen en te begrijpenhoewel je wel een beetje kennis nodig hebt om de php en mysql te begrijpen zeker niet voor beginners.Het hele boek is in het Engels maar niet met moeilijke woorden elke Nederlander die een beetje Engels heeft gehad op de lagere school begrijpt dit.Amazon and Larry thanks for this book!

Larry Ullman's writing is clear and quite nice to read. It seems he has not forgotten that when learning something new, even advanced programmers appreciate a little hand-holding. So many authors of programming books seem to think if they give away actual, working code, us programmers will be little more than lazy sloths simply copying and pasting, and never thinking of our own accord. Truth is, seeing one way it can be done, allows us to envision others, get inspired even, to make it our own. Larry Ullman's books are always inspiring and help me envision a better way to code.This book covers so many topics I sorely needed to have more fully explained, such as custom error handling, prepared statements (when to use what when doing SELECT versus INSERT, etc.), form security, merchant account/payment gateway integration, and lots more.This book is an asset to your personal library.

I'm fairly new to php and mysql so moderate to advanced books never scared me. I always buy some primer on the subject along with more advanced books like this one. Btw, excellent primer books I have is ISBN: 1449319262 and 1430232498.The quality contents/examples is what I like in this new edition. The only negative thing I didn't like is the bold font of php code snippets. They look like a blob of spaghetti.

I have a comfortable understanding of SQL/Database, PHP, MySQL, HTML 5, and CSS 3. This book gives more insights into those, and for a nice feature that was not mentioned in the description: the examples are written using Bootstrap 3! I have been learning the Bootstrap framework for the past few months, so the fact that this book is using it is "icing on the cake" for me.

amazing book i would recommend this book to anyone. it teach you step by step how to develop different type of ecommerce site i bought the book just to learn how to integrate credit cards payments to my site and i end up learning some server security tip amazing book

great book, with great content.

I can't imagine a better way to introduce the design of commercial websites than the informative approach by Larry Ullman. He seems to have a knack of knowing exactly what you need to know and pitching it at just the right level. His books are enjoyable to read and informative at just those points when you need some extra information. As a retired software engineer and database designer and administrator then I find his books fun to read and look forward to learning something new with each chapter. This book has the same approach and I would recommend it highly to those developers starting out on their own for the first time.

If you are in the transition from beginner to intermediate php, then this book will teach you some good stuff.Such as stored procedures for mySQL and how to implement a shopping cart.I think thats where Larry was aiming it at.There are some areas. explaining the MVC architecture for example, I am at odds with.to me , the book implies that the database layer is the entirety of model and that php is the controller. this is not entirely true. The database layer is only part of the Model, the other part of the model being the business processes that are implemented in php. but that's possibly going somewhere the book maybe didn't want to coverAlso, The use of objects are not as comprehensive as they could have been.for example, in a book of this substance, I would have expected a templating system be used , to separate out the view code, from the PHP. This would actually have made it even easier to comprehendI gave it 4 stars because of that. Perhaps in the next edition, we'll see a templating system and more objects. Then I will give it 5 stars.But hey, this is a good book and worthy of a read, its certainly better than most of the books out there trying to cover similar topics. I've got hundreds, so I am in a position to compare..I guess I'm just a critical reviewerAlso, Unless you want to jump in at the deep end, this should not be your first php book.

I have given this book four stars, only because I have yet to read it all the way through and can't say for sure if it's worth five or not.I am relatively new to web development, having only been learning for about 6 months (including HTML and CSS). And the only other PHP and MySQL book I have read is 'PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites', which is by the same author.I was unsure if the jump from 'beginner/intermediate' to 'intermediate/advanced' would be too hard, but this book follows along perfectly from the last,almost as if Larry intended it to be so.It starts off with no coding at all, just two chapters of security and general concepts, then it's right back to the code writing.I like that it doesn't hold your hand too much, it requires that you understand what you are doing, not just mindlessly copying. But at the same time it's not hard to understand, everything is explained in good detail and I really feel like I could create an online store from scratch after finishing this.If there's one thing I wish this book had, it would be the 'Review/Pursue' sections at the end of each chapter, that's one thing I miss from the other book.

If you are after a book on current practical use of PHP and MySQL, then this is it.Two E-commerce projects are tackled and can be easily adapted for your own use.Well written with easy to follow the examples.

Had the first edition but this one's gone a step better. Inclusion of OOP and 2 payment options (paypal and stripe) is a bonus ... but boy oh boy its chunky ! Lots of info. I'd say its targeted to intermediate. Beginner get his other "building dynamic web pages".