How to do Everything with PHP & MySQL

Table of Contents

How to do Everything with PHP & MySQL is broadly divided into four sections. Here's what each section contains:

Section 1: Learning The Basics provides an introduction to PHP and MySQL, and guides you through the process of installing and configuring a PHP-MySQL development environment on both UNIX and Windows.

Chapter 1, Introducing PHP and MySQL discusses the history and evolution of PHP and MySQL, looks at their individual feature sets, and explains why the combination of the two is such a compelling value proposition.
Chapter 2, Setting Up A PHP-MySQL Development Environment discusses how to obtain, install, configure and test a PHP-MySQL development environment, for both Windows and UNIX users.

Section 2: Learning PHP focuses on the basics of PHP programming, introducing you to PHP syntax and language structures and demonstrating practical PHP applications in the Web context

Chapter 3, Using Variables, Statements And Operators gets you started with PHP, by showing you how to embed PHP code inside HTML documents and use statements, comments, variables and operators.
Chapter 4, Using Conditional Statements And Loops teaches you to use PHP's comparison and logical in conditional statements and loops to make your PHP scripts respond intelligently to different events.
Chapter 5, Using Arrays And Custom Functions shows you how to group related data into PHP arrays, and define your own functions for greater re-usability of your PHP code.
Chapter 6, Using Files, Sessions, Cookies And External Programs contains a grab-bag of common techniques and tools you will find yourself using frequently in your PHP development.
Chapter 7, Session-Based Shopping Cart builds on everything taught thus far to create a session-based shopping cart you can plug in to your Web site.

Section 3: Learning MySQL introduces the MySQL RDBMS, teaching you the basic commands and concepts you need to use it efficiently.

Chapter 8, Understanding An RDBMS gives you a crash course in basic RDBMS concepts and introduces you to the MySQL command-line client
Chapter 9, Working With Databases And Tables looks at the database and table structures used by MySQL to store its data, and explains the SQL commands to create, alter and delete databases, tables and indexes.
Chapter 10, Editing Records And Performing Queries continues where the previous chapter left off, explaining how to insert records into a MySQL database and use the SELECT statement to create filtered subsets of the records in a database; sort, group and count records; use session variables; and import and export data in a variety of different formats.
Chapter 11, Using The MySQL Security System discusses the MySQL security and privilege system, and the management of user accounts and passwords (including what do to if you forget the MySQL superuser password).
Chapter 12, Order Tracking System takes you through the process of designing a larger, more challenging database for a small business' order tracking system, and also teaches practical database normalization.

Section 4: Using PHP with MySQL brings PHP and MySQL together, teaching you the tools and techniques you will need to retrieve and use the results of MySQL queries in a dynamic Web application.

Chapter 13, Querying A MySQL Database With PHP examines the built-in MySQL support in PHP and explains how it can be used to perform and process MySQL queries.
Chapter 14, Validating User Input teaches you to maintain the integrity and passwords of your database by sanitizing and validating user input before it is saved to the system. Among the items covered: ensuring required fields are never left empty, validating the length and data type of user input; and using regular expressions to validate email addresses.
Chapter 15, Formatting Query Output discusses common techniques used by PHP developers to make the results of MySQL queries more readable and useful. Both PHP and MySQL come with numerous functions for output manipulation and display, and this chapter explains how to use them on strings, numbers and timestamps.
Chapter 16, News Publishing System concludes the tutorial, using everything you've learned to build a real-world application that retrieves data from a MySQL database with PHP to create a news publishing system for a public Web site.