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Title: Too Much Fluff
Review: I first learned PHP from Luke Welling and Laura Thomson's excellent "PHP and MySQL Web Development," and bought 'MySQL/PHP Database Applications' to provide an alternative perspective on solving problems. Unfortunately, this book doesn't offer enough content to warrant its high price.A full 58 pages is devoted to a PHP function reference which is a bit of a joke because PHP has one of the better online function references available. Code examples are printed with very large font again taking up more space than is necessary.Most important, though, some of these examples are a little bit suspect.They present a Catalog application written using Object Oriented Programming (OOP). This would have been valuable except that the classes they create are so specific that they couldn't be re-used -- basically negating the value of OOP to begin with.They do provide a couple of examples of good and bad relational database schema, but that isn't really worth the cost of this book.
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