Review by Z. Werner for Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition (Beginning: From Novice to Professional) (Volume 0)
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I have recently completed reading this book in its entirety. First, here’s what I liked about this book. This book is a wonderful presentation of how to build an e-commerce site from start to finish. It touches on nearly all the major considerations you are faced with when developing an e-commerce site and the author uses sound coding practices throughout the book. The major topics readers will be interested in are creating shopping carts, search functionality, content management system, and the ordering system. I especially appreciated how SEO was integrated into this book and how AJAX was used to enhance some features. Another important aspect was its coverage of the many ways to accept online payments which are presented throughout the book. When I e-mailed Cristian a question regarding this book he replied promptly.

Here’s what I disliked about this book. This book is not a beginning PHP book and it’s not a beginning MySQL book like the title might suggest. It is a beginning e-commerce book and readers are expected to be familiar with both PHP and MySQL. It is also assumed that you are familiar with OOP and the smarty templating engine. For people not familiar with smarty this might be a little intimidating. Smarty is actually fairly straight forward but you might need to visit http://www.smarty.net for a crash course. Help is given to set up your working environment and the authors do get you started down the right path with smarty.

I certainly did not like the writing style of this book. Most chapters start out with objectives quickly followed by numerous pages of code. This section of code is followed by a paragraph, entitled what just happened, which loosely describes what the code does but not how the code works. This same process is repeated until the end of the chapter. All of the code is commented well but it’s up to you the reader to understand what’s going on. I would have preferred if a little more time was spent describing the concepts being used. I get the feeling the authors were trying to cram this book into 700 pages out of fear of having a 1000 plus page book. Personally I wouldn’t have minded if it were that long. On the flip side this did force me to really focus and understand what I was reading and not just “follow along”.

Lastly, I did not like that this book did not also cover macs. There are only a handful of changes that need to be made to make this work on a mac however if you are not familiar with developing PHP sites on a mac you could easily get hung up on one of these simple problems.

Considering my dislikes you might be surprised that I didn’t rate this book lower, but a walked away having learned so much I had to give this book at least four stars. This book is challenging but well worth every page.

As for critics that claimed this book is “impossible” or that “the code doesn’t work” or that “the author won’t respond” don’t believe it. This book is challenging but as long as you stay focused and follow the book closely there should be no problems and yes the author did respond to my questions.

Review by Rangel A. Spasov for Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition (Beginning: From Novice to Professional) (Volume 0)
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The book offers great insight for building the basis of a professional, scalable ecommerce system. The code is well explained, but only if you already have decent knowledge of PHP. My only complaint is the book’s structure. For example, usually a chapter begins by fully creating all the database stored procedures and the data tier, then goes to the business tier, and finally explains the presentation stuff (the book uses the Smarty template engine). In my opinion it would be better if it was organized by functionality rather that application layers. It makes the book less logical and requires a little bit of getting used to.

Review by Roskva, Thor’s servant for Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition (Beginning: From Novice to Professional) (Volume 0)
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I can’t speak highly enough of this book, but be sure you are buying it for the rights reasons. Here’s why:

I have good knowledge of HTML and CSS, but I know very little about PHP, SQL, and MySQL. I want to start an online store, and HTML and CSS just won’t cut it. I knew from the beginning I would need to learn PHP, and likely JavaScript to create a functioning store.

HOWEVER: This book does not teach you PHP. It does not teach you JavaScript, or SQL, MySQL, AJAX, or any programming language at all. Are we clear on that? Good.

Now that that is settled, let’s see why this book really shines!

This book is about e-commerce. It is a tutorial, and it leads you step-by-step through creating an online store that is fully-functional, secure, and flexible. If you do all the steps, you end up with a complete store. Oh, wait, did I say IF you do all the steps? Actually, no. You can cut and paste the code as you go, if you want, although you would learn less that way. Either way, you need to be thorough. Programming is not for the sloppy, impatient, or anyone with the “that’s close enough” mentality. You must follow the instructions meticulously, and you will have to track down every typo. There will be some troubleshooting involved, but I figured it out, and I don’t know PHP, like I said earlier.

So, if the code is available for download at the author’s website . . . why get the book at all? Well, because if you want to learn how it all works together, how to customize it without breaking it, how to improve or adapt it, and why it is set up the way it is–then you need to read the book. It is easy enough to read and understand, even without much knowledge of PHP.

I found this book to be perfect, because it is exactly what I needed: a tutorial for creating a fully-functional, secure, and flexible store.

So is this book for raw beginners? No. You should have enough experience with webpages to comprehend HTML and CSS, minimally. Experience with programming is a help, but not necessary.

So is this book for intermediate web designers? Absolutely!

How about advanced designers . . . well, I’m not qualified to answer that. But I can tell you the authors of this book have very sound logic when it comes to the architecture of an online store. I imagine it would be beneficial to all but the most experienced designers.

Bottomline?

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK FOR ANYONE DESIGNING AN ONLINE STORE.

Review by David Caruso for Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition (Beginning: From Novice to Professional) (Volume 0)
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Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce is exactly what it describes…a beginning. I just finished the book and have created a fully functioning store with all of the features touched on in the book, however the site still needed a lot of work to make it useful in the real world.

Smarty is used heavily and while it doesn’t go into too much detail on how it works, I have a pretty good understanding how to use it now and can’t imagine doing a site of this scale by myself without it. To put it simply, I used hardly a PHP echo in developing the entire site because site presentation and php code are separate files. Thanks Smarty.

This book doesn’t contain much about graphics. The site design leaves a lot to be desired. Hopefully you know CSS so you can make it your own. I spent a lot of time customizing my design and it’s relatively easy to make it look professional. Design is what I know, so my previous knowledge of site design and this book seemed to make a good match.

The front-end site doesn’t need much tweaking in terms of functionality. Pretty much everything you want in a user experience is presented in the book such as reviews, a form of cross-selling, the shopping cart, etc. The back-end admin needed a lot of extra work on my part. I added customer admin, a shipping admin and some other things that would make me more capable of handling orders. Also, I expanded the catalog with more info and turned it into inventory management.

I think the most valuable part for me was the search engine optimization (SEO) section. This is probably one of the most important requirements for a site today and they really do explain it well in such a short amount of space. I knew nothing about SEO and now I have an excellent start on understanding it.

The authors give you just about everything you need to make a basic site and then add your own features. You learn enough that it gets your creative juices flowing and you can add more features on your own with relative ease. I originally considered using an open-source ecommerce package, but I’m happy I developed my own with this book. It ends up being a fast and secure store with plenty of expansion possibilities.

Review by T. Titeev for Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition (Beginning: From Novice to Professional) (Volume 0)
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I can’t really criticize a lot on this book. I am only on chapter 3 starting 4 today. This book requires some sort of programming knowledge, which suited me. So if you haven’t developed any websites I wouldn’t suggest it.

Mr. Darie makes you use smarty templates and yahoo table builder, which kind of upset me because I was hoping to see everything made from scratch without 3rd party engines and such.

Bottom line. This book needs a lot of dedication and time. It does teach you a lot of stuff, assuming you know the basics of programming.

Highly recommend for experienced programmers.