Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition [Paperback]

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 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.

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.

I don't like this book:
1. this probably is the worse source code structure I have ever seen; lower layer calling into code in higher layers. for example, program in libs calling into presentation layers which sits at upper layer of the source code.
2. there is no layers of source code, the logic and source code are spreaded every where and jump a lot. VERY DIFFICULT TO FOLLOW THOUGHTS. The call stack in chapter foru have 11 levels, to just display the category list. My goodness. This book is based on a very messy and unstructured source code.
3. the english description is very wording
4. the source code uses smarty, bringing another level of complexity; should just just mvc
5. hate the organization of the book; source code are listed in fragments, and explanation are separated in every where and repeating. I wish they could do source code toghether in a few pages, and the description also together in its own pages.
6. I do not recommend buying this book.

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