Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites Author: Robin Nixon | Language: English | ISBN:
1449319262 | Format: PDF
Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites Description
If you're familiar with HTML, using the information in
Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and CSS, you will quickly learn how to build interactive, data-driven websites with the powerful combination of PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and CSS - the top technologies for creating modern sites. This hands-on guide explains each technology separately, shows you how to combine them, and introduces valuable web programming concepts such as objects, XHTML, cookies, and session management.
Carefully paced for non-programmers, this second edition of the top-selling guide to web development now also provides an extensive introduction to CSS, and benefits from reader questions and suggestions about the first edition, making the new edition even easier to follow and more information-packed than ever.
Plus, to ensure your have understood all the main points, you'll practice what you've learned with review questions at the end of each chapter, and there's even a sample social networking platform built with the elements introduced in this book.
Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and CSS will enable you to:
- Understand PHP up to an intermediate level, including the basics of object-oriented programming
- Master MySQL, from database structure to complex queries
- Create web pages with PHP and MySQL by integrating forms and other HTML features
- Learn about JavaScript, from functions and event handling to accessing the Document Object Model
- Pick up the basics of CSS (and CSS3) and learn how to use it to create compelling and dynamic web pages.
- Find out how to manipulate CSS properties directly from JavaScript
- Make Ajax calls and turn your website into a highly interactive environment
- Upload and manipulate files and images, validate user input, and secure your applications
- Bring all these technologies together to create a social networking site
- Paperback: 586 pages
- Publisher: O'Reilly Media; Second Edition edition (September 3, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1449319262
- ISBN-13: 978-1449319267
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 1.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
This is a very good resource for learning these topics. It is not for absolute beginners. You need to have a working knowledge of html and how websites work. I suggest that you should have coded a website, and reached a point where you want to do something specific, but cannot figure out how.
I have been checking out every book I can find from my library that covers PHP/MySQL, JavaScript, and HTML/CSS. My wife balked at how many books I had. It was a stack of thick dull texts LITERALLY 5 feet tall. They were all dense, boring, and assumed that I knew things that only a web developer would know. I would read a chapter or two in each before I could go no further.
Out of all of those books, this is the one book I bought.
Now, this is still a thick, dense book. The author tries his best to make the book enjoyable to read. He gives good examples, and immediately explains why he does things this way, how things might be different, what mistakes you might make, and how you would implement this new knowledge. It is this explanation that makes this book worth buying. Every other book will tell you something and move on. I assume that other authors take for granted that they know the why's and how's and such, that they do not want to waste time on details that seem tedious to them. This author really works hard to make the content as easy to understand as possible.
This means that there are parts I am familiar with and skip over. That is fine. For the parts I struggle with, I am very grateful to have all of the expounded information available.
I cannot speak about updates from the 1st edition, since I did not read it. I will most likely buy the next edition, if the changes/additions are substantial. I would like to see more on forms and cookies.
I bought this book because I have been building static websites with HTML/CSS for a while and wanted to see if I could take this skill to the next level. I think this book brought me a long way towards that aim. I would recommend it to anyone who knows AT LEAST basic HTML and preferably has some programming experience as well. You don't have to be a wiz, but it helps if you know the concepts of loops and objects in other languages.
When introducing a new language, the author tends to tell you A LOT about the syntax of the language before going into any detail about what you can do with it. The best way to read the book is to have a project in mind as you go through these chapters, and try to incorporate new concepts as they come up. Of course, this will probably make your project a mess by the time it's done, but in the end it's a learning exercise. The book is full of code snippets to demonstrate functionality, but a bit lacking in what I would call real-world examples (until the last chapter).
The place where this really became a problem, for me at least, was the section on JavaScript. We first spend two chapters going through the JS syntax: loops, variables, arrays, objects, if/else, on and on and on, including things you won't necessarily need for a while like object prototypes (JS and PHP share some common ancestry and so a lot of this feels repeated). The author throws out the concept of the Document Object Model but we don't come back to it for quite a while.
By the time we get a real-world example of where JavaScript is used in actual webpages, it's in the context of form validation. In spite of the lengthly introduction to the language, the code presented is at first incomprehensible.
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