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Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional
In The Expert’s Voice in Open Source series, Apress has harnessed the knowledge and expertise of some of the best folks in open source and this book is no exception. — Mary Norbury-Glaser, Slashdot Contributor (Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce) serves as a fantastic primer for anyone joining the fray in designing and developing online commerce solutions. — Blane Warrene, Open Sourcery  helpful in understanding how to achieve these common tasks in building
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Review by Michael B. Brand for Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional
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The other reviewers did not emphasize a point I did not grasp until I bought the book. The book does not just introduce Smarty as a concept. A major trust of the book is Smarty. It could even be argued that the book is really about using Smarty for e-commerce and how to write PHP code to support Smarty. There is very little MySQL-specific info (mainly just an introduction to PEAR DB and use of standard SQL queries). If you are not planning to use Smarty for presentation templating, there is not much to be gained from reading this book. If you are going to use Smarty, then this book offers a cookbook approach with some theory.
As I will not be using Smarty in my project, I am dissapointed in the book and have gleaned just a few new ideas. Reading this book has also confirmed my decision to not use Smarty. In my opinion, Smarty needlessly adds a level of complexity on top of the PHP code and is not designed for editing in WYSIWYG editors such as Dreamweaver. There are several templating engines that are simpler to learn and use than Smarty (eg, Flexy). It seems to me that the whole book would have benefited from using a simpler templating engine and making the book less dependent on a single method of presentation (ie, Smarty).
Review by Dude for Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional
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I have bought numerous programming books in the past and have always wanted a thorough book that covers detailed development of an e-Commerce website. I’ve bought several that claim to be indepth in this area but they have all fallen short of being what I was looking for. I’ve never bought a book without reading the reviews on it first….but this book was so new when I bought it that there were no reviews available for it. It sounded like it contained what I was looking for so I took a chance and bought it. I’m really glad I took that chance! “Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional” is THE ABSOLUTE BEST BOOK available that details, step-by-step, how to build a full-fledge e-Commerce website…and believe me, I have bought every PHP/MySQL book (plus many more) that can’t hold up to their claims….but this book delivers what the others can’t. This is truly a ONE OF A KIND book.
Firstly, this books covers the ins and outs of installing PHP, PEAR, MySQL, and Apache on your Unix based machine (installations for Windows systems are also covered).
Secondly, the book shows you detailed code that performs different functions and then explains step-by-step what each bit of the code is doing.
Plus, this is THE ONLY book that will show you how to do database queries that return images from a product catalog and lay out the images with a description and link to a product page. The other PHP / MySQL books only go as far as showing you how to build a page header and footer with text only query results.
Also, the book helps you set up your site for future expansion. It uses Smarty Templating for page layouts so that your site is easy to modify and maintain and Darie shows you how to use PEAR DB abstraction to allow for changes in the type of database you might decide to use in the future (ex. , migrating from MySQL to Oracle). That being said, the title of the book is a little misleading in the fact that MySQL is used very little in this book. The book uses PEAR to perform the MySQL functionality.
I have bought books in the past that end up being written hastily with poor writing style and code errors galore. Cristian Darie and Mr. Bucica have taken the time to write a near perfect book. If you don’t believe me look at the erata for this book at Apress.com….there are almost no coding errors at all. And, their writing style really makes the book fun to read.
Lastly, and definitely worth mentioning, I ran into a PHP problem that I couldn’t solve. Cristian Darie listed his website and e-mail address in the front of this book and I thought I’d try e-mailing him to help me. I didn’t expect to receive a reply, especially since having e-mailed other authors in the past with no reply. Within three hours Cristian Darie had replied to my e-mail with the solution to my problem. He was very nice and polite and even offered his help if I ran into future problems as I was working through the book! This is absolutely amazing and UNPARALLELED CUSTOMER SUPPORT.
If you want to know how to develop your site the right way and learn a lot in the process, then this is the book for you!
Review by Harold McFarland for Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional
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The use of PHP 5 and MySQL for e-commerce is a tested and proven combination. This book is primarily intended for the reader who already has some PHP knowledge and needs to understand how to build an e-commerce site. It does not focus on teaching either PHP 5 or MySQL but instead focuses on how to use the combination to produce an exceptional e-commerce solution.
The authors use the example of a Tshirt shop and walk the reader through every step of completely constructing a viable e-commerce site. The book covers everything from designing your site, to creating a product catalog, searching the catalog, receiving payments, catalog administration, creating a shopping basket, working with customer orders, product recommendations, storing customer information, secure connections, implementing the order pipeline, working with credit cards, and setting up product reviews.
The appendixes include detailed information on installing Apache, PHP, MySQL, and phpAdmin (for both Windows and Unix-like systems), hosting your web site, and project management.
While this is not a book about learning the PHP scripting language it does contain enough detailed code to create a functioning e-commerce site even if you don’t understand how the code works. For example, on page 192 it says to “Create a new template file named admin_login.tpl in the templates folder and add the following code to it:…” This is followed by a long code listing that produces the desired results. There is a short explanation of the function of various sections of the code but nothing that details the purpose of each command, variable, etc. This is really not a problem since they state up front that the target audience is a PHP programmer who needs to learn how to build an e-commerce site, but it does deserve mention for those who have no knowledge of PHP and are considering the book.
The first thing a person might notice when thinking about purchasing this book is that there is no CD in the back containing all the many examples of source code. This could be very discouraging as the examples are extensive and rewriting them by hand without error can be a daunting task. However, Apress does make all of the examples available for download at their web site.
Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce is highly recommended for anyone who has some basic knowledge of PHP and MySQL and wants to capitalize on this to build a powerful e-commerce site.
Review by Rumpelstiltskin for Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional
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I am a newbie when it comes to Website programming (although I am familiar with SQL theory and programming logic from programming in Delphi). I have worked the last eight weeks on a website from scratch (using this code from the book as the basis). Through trial and error (and internet searches), I am only now beginning to understand the whole PHP/MySQL concept. Nonetheless, we will be going LIVE this following Tuesday with a living, breathing, dynamic (as opposed to static), fully functional, secure website. It’s hard to believe.
We will have 128 bit SSL Security and Trust Certificate (thru Comodo purchased through our website host) with a live payment pipeline (purchased through Verisign). This means that we will be able to authorize and collect (after inventory is confirmed) MC/Visa payments in real time (seconds), with instant email confirmation of Order Received and Order Shipped. There is NO WAY I could’ve done this on my own… especially in 8 weeks. I know 8 weeks seems like a long time, but in terms of a fully functional, SECURE website, it really isn’t. I have ‘tweaked’ the website a great deal to fit our look and requirements, but the basic MySQL database and logic are unchanged. I may have added another field here or there, and that is about it.
A couple of precautions though… you MUST have it hosted on a webhosting site that has PHP5 (save the frustration). You MUST have the webhosting company install the Pear Mail for your ‘libs’ folder on your server. And your webhosting company will have to recompile php5 on their server with pfpro (verisign’s payment gateway file library). That’s it… If I would’ve known this to start with, it would’ve gone quicker than 8 weeks.
I don’t know if it’s OK to put in a plug for the webhosting company I am using (I am not a part of the company), but Nexcess.net out of Michigan has been terrific to work with. I probably wouldn’t have been able to find out all of the above paragraph without their help. They never complained… they only worked with me to get the job done. Probably other webhosting sites will do that also. I’m just pleased with them.
A last addition to the above review… we no longer use Verisign as our payment processor. We now use Authorize.net. That took a little time to set up (a few days). But after an internet search for the Authorize.net file (search using terms like “authorize.net” “x_customer_ip” “x_country” “x_first_name”), I just copied and pasted that file into my Collect Funds file (in the Commerce Library), set up the links from MySQL, and everything worked great! The book is set up for Verisign, but we were able to convert to Authorize.net this way. There are only about 4 payment ‘pipeline’ providers in the US, with Verisign and Authorize.net being two of the four (the others are mostly proprietary). Hope this helps!
Review by Ben Jern, Loh for Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional
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Cristian Darie has done it again. The last book I had authored by him was Beginning ASP.NET 1.1 E-Commerce. It was a book which guided me from the introduction of three-tier programming all the way to the creation of a full-blown, feature packed e-commerce website using Microsoft’s ASP.NET Technologies.
This book, Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce was written with the similar concept in mind.
Very often, programmers are faced with situation where once the web application is fully developed, modifying or extending it in the near future is nothing but a nightmare! The solution? Three-Tier architecture! They are the presentation tier, business tier and the data tier. In this book, Christian Darie and his co-author Mihai Bucica, first introduces the reader into the world of three-tier architecture programming.
From there, the reader is given preliminary information such as the various technologies available for dynamic page creation and the different tools which the reader would expect to use during the course of the book such as PHP for dynamic web page generation and MySQL as the database management system.
One fundamental aspect of the book which I found rather interesting was the way the authors blended the different tools and programming language used to develop the e-commerce website with the context of the three-tier architecture as mentioned earlier.
The presentation tier here was presented with the a mix of both HTML and PHP. Instead of the confusing spaghetti code style where PHP coding is seen interleaved with HTML coding, Bucica and Darie introduced the idea of using Smarty Templates which is similar to Microsoft’s ASP.NET code-behind concept where the programming language is separated from the HTML code to improve code management and readability.
The online store’s business logic is then coded in PHP classes which represents the business tier of the architecture.
Then comes the third tier, also known as the data tier where the store’s data management resides. This tier is represented by MySQL. However in an effort to provide a systematic way in managing SQL coding, the authors followed the idea of using Stored Procedures which, at the time of writing was not a feature available with MySQL. As such, a plugin name PEAR DB was introduced to help facilitate the usage of stored procedures.
With such clear cut separation between HTML, PHP coding, business logic PHP classes, MySQL for data management and PEAR DB to manage SQL Queries (stored procedures) , managing, upgrading and maintaining the application from a coding perspective is simply a breeze.
When it comes to learning, there is nothing like practical, hands-on work and this is where this book excels in. After introducing readers to the concept of the three-tier architecture, readers are then brought through a step-by-step creation of a fictional online e-commerce store called the TShirtShop which comes complete with a shopping cart, web based administration system for the online store all the way to receiving online payments through various channels such PayPal and credit cards.
If these may scare you, fear not, the authors present coding in a clear, easy to understand manner with suggestion of best coding practices, code manageability alongside with self-explaining comments within each snippet of code.
Another advantage when using this book is the different stages in which the authors introduce various features to compliment to the site. After completing the first few chapters (chapters 1 through 9), you have a complete site which comes with shopping cart functionality, catalogue search and ability in receiving orders. Other functionalities which were also covered in the book such as implementing credit card transactions, customer product reviews, product recommendations and integration to various web services such as that of Amazon.com can be implemented on a needed basis.
As such, if you have preliminary knowledge on the PHP programming language and would like to have a feature packed e-commerce solution on an open source platform, this is certainly one of the best books I would recommend to anyone venturing into the world of e-commerce.