Quite a few books deal with PHP, and a few cover MySQL. We’ve read some of these and found a few to be quite helpful. If you’re looking for a book that deals with the gory details of either of these packages, you should probably look elsewhere.
The focus of this book is applications development. We are concerned with what it takes to get data-driven Web sites up and running in an organized and efficient way. The book does not go into arcane detail of every aspect of either of these tools. For example, in this book you will not find a discussion of PHP’s LDAP functions or MySQL’s C application program interface (API). Instead, we focus on the pieces of both packages that affect one another. We hope that by the time you’re done with this book you’ll know what it takes to get an application up and running using PHP and MySQL.
