PHP and MySQL Web Development 4th Ed-tqw-_darksiderg

Introduction
WELCOME TO PHP AND MYSQL WEB DEVELOPMENT. Within its pages, you will find
distilled knowledge from our experiences using PHP and MySQL, two of the hottest
web development tools around.
In this introduction, we cover
n Why you should read this book
n What you will be able to achieve using this book
n What PHP and MySQL are and why they’re great
n What’s changed in the latest versions of PHP and MySQL
n How this book is organized
Let’s get started.
Why You Should Read This Book
This 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.
This 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.
We wrote the first edition of this book because we 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.