Comments about O'Reilly Media Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript:

This book is pretty much every you need to get started with web development. Of course, a knowledge of html is a prerequisite, but you shouldn't be buying a book away php until you until html.

The step-by-step guide is awesome for going through the code information and then examples. The attention to the detail in the second-half of the book seems like the author just wanted to finish it quickly - more for an intermediate - can get lost quite a bit without much support.

All being said, I think this is the perfect book to get you started with php, mysql and javascript.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript:

Download the examples and just follow Nixon!
It couldn't be any easier..

Comments about O'Reilly Media Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript:

Not an absolutely thorough book of EVERYTHING you need to know but its pretty close. I have already reccommended this book to a few friends who are on the same level as I am in programming. I took a few programming courses in college years ago then joined the MarineCorps and forgot everything. This book was the perfect reintroduction in programming for me.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript:

If you are able to pick up new technology sets fairly well, or have had even the slightest experience with any of these, this book is perfect. It has excellent examples that get you comfortable with the core behaviors of each technology. If you have never turned on a computer, maybe you should go to the dummies books...

Comments about O'Reilly Media Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript:

This book is supposed to be geared toward beginners. I have already gotten through two course (HTML and XML) without too much difficulty. With this in mind I have some issues with this book (only on page 69 at the time of this review). First, it introduces many terms without explanation. One example of this is the difference between echo and print. Both are introduced well before the purpose of either is discussed, or the difference between the two is explained, and the explanation was terrible. I had to go other sources before I knew what the difference was between the two. At another point of confusion the author discussed the identity operator. Believe that I had missed the explanation of this operator, I looked in the index. The index noted to (see === under symbols). So, I looked for "symbols" in the index, which did not exist. I also looked in the table of contents, and appendixes--no luck. Another Major Problem I have with the book is that there are no hands on activities. He simple presents the code, and every once in awhile shows the output. Being a former teacher, I know that this is no way to teach new material to beginners. Hopefully the book will get better as I get deeper into the content, but I am not hopeful.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript:

The idea is excellent, a book for beginner's to understand how HTML, PHP, MYSQL, and Javascript interact to create dynamic web pages. Only problem are the number of errors. Page 233 in particular. Readers slogging through all the code finally get to see how the MYSQL database and a web page would interact yet the code is wrong. On the errata page, the author puts "correct" code which also doesn' work. Now I will have to buy another book, that hopefully is without the errors.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript:

I enjoyed this book a lot but before telling why I feel necessary to present myself and my own experience.
I am new in programming (less than one year). I began learning programming at the age of 58. I started with a complicated add-on to OpenOffice's Writer to help people learning Japanese. I had to learn the Java language as well as the use of an IDE and to dive instantly into the OpenOffice API. I must confess that it was rather a very discouraging experience. I was faced with concepts I could not even imagine at first. It was difficult but I didn't gave up. With the API 's documentation and examples and with the help of some guys on forums I could manage to write it; some times not understanding very well what I was doing. I let it six months and then came back to it, reading once again the Java course and the OO API. This time I had a better understanding and I rewrote some parts in order to fix some bugs.

Based on this experience, I would first say that what is difficult for a newbie in computing science is not to grasp the concepts behind the various languages such as Java, C++, PHP etc.., but to figure out in the Amazonian forest of computing technologies, how these technologies are related to each other; what is important and what is not and what are the alternatives. Moreover, it is of primary importance that you understand in which order to learn things.
Secondly, you need to see the language concepts in action in complete and self-sufficient examples and not like very often authors present them, only as example fragments. Of course the implementation of the examples has to be clearly explained and their introduction must follow a logical course.

Fortunately, it is exactly what I found in this book. I could read it from beginning to end as easily you read a novel and I could run all the examples. I now feel confident to enter the field, new to me, of Web programming.
Definitively, a great book!

Comments about O'Reilly Media Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript:

I chose this book to teach myself PHP and understand its interaction with related web application development tools, Javascript and MySQL. The book is written for the novice programmer but the its most relevant coding example, for writing and retrieving records to/from a MySQL database does not work. While the author has provided a correction for one instance on the book's errata site, no explanation is given for the error condition nor why its resolution works. The reader learns nothing about PHP from what could have been a valuable lesson. But even in its corrected form, the example script fails to reinitialize an input form so can only be run once. Correcting that issue is beyond the skills of a beginning PHP programmer and inexplicably beyond the scope of the book.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript:

I recently received a copy of O'Reilly's new book Learning PHP, MySQL & JavaScript. It's an interesting little book. It's aimed at those who have no prior programming experience, but it's a great volume even for those who do know what they're doing. PHP/MySQL and JavaScript are already the de-facto standard for web development. If you ain't got PHP/MySQL and JavaScript or at least something comparable like Rails, you ain't got nothing. That being said, the PHP content in this book compares extremely favorably to that of my favorite, PHP Essentials by Julie Meloni. I showed the book to my friend, who really appreciated the fact that this book has PHP and MySQL in the same book. Often, books are either about PHP or about MySQL, and so you are left juggling a number of different books when you want to use these technologies that are so often used in tandem. One thing that strikes me about this book is that it's EXTREMELY concise. It's really great as a desk reference, even as one in the "Learning" series, which are traditionally (from my view) more grounded in walking you through step-by-step examples. At the same time, this is textbook-worthy: I've been honing my JavaScript skills through this book and it has lots of great questions at the end of each section that you can use to test yourself. A great book, and broadly applicable.