Dreamweaver 8 : The Missing Manual (Missing Manual)

Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 with ASP, ColdFusion, and PHP : Training from the Source (Training from the Source)

CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions (Solutions)

PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide

Php Books

Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8

Format: Paperback
Author: David Powers
ReleaseDate: 19 December, 2005
Publisher: friends of ED
Rating:

One of the best books for Dreamweaver and PHP
Anyway, David Powers shows excellent ability to convey his vast experience in a concisive and easy to understand matter. Actually, I am convinced it may be the best by far, but I might have missed one or two.

Typically authors get lost in the somewhat confusing options to install and debugg PHP and MySQL to make it work with Dreamweaver, but David manages to stay clear of those problems and walks the reader through the process with "ease". While in the process you get to learn many related tidbits that show differences with different versions of DW or even between Mac and PC.

This book also vastly improved over the previous publication for DW MX and PHP -- which David worked on with a group of developers. It appears that going on his own helped clarity and overall information flow a great deal. Even the previoulsy confusing and sometimes unprofessional layout of the first book got improved. Basically all my issues with the first book got resolved.

The price is good and given the above-average educational it's almost a steal. Fortunately it's written well enough for beginners and intermediate alike. Even professional might find some good information in this book though they're clearly not the target audience. I am not too fond about the front cover, as it doesn't convey the topic for me, but that personal preference and really my only negative point.

- Thomas.

Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8
I am at the point of takeing the full plunge into PHP & MySQL. I found the book highly helpfull. It is quite helpfull to have a point from which to branch out. Most of my databse efferts (fully 80%) will be consumed with maintaining tables behind the scenes. I needed a way to get going quickly and appearance was much less important than function. I found the book well layed out and an easy read. Then when at the computer I found the book also an easy tutorial that I could instantly convert to my job at hand. I got several good hints pointing me to how functions can be done quick & dirty. The code Dreamweaver automatically creates gave me plenty of good examples. The book even showed me how to create my own server behaviours and modify the existing ones to fit my needs. I have even created some simple ones already.

Excellent book
His description about how to setup PHP, Apache and MySQL on the PC so I could run these locally was terrific. Being a person who didn't know the first thing about PHP and MySQL, I found this book extremely good. His writing style is also very easy to follow and I progressed thru the material with ease.

At first I was going to rate this 4 stars because I felt he put too much emphasis on CSS and HTML programming issues in the first several chapters that was needed to just get the example web site up and running. I guess I would have prefered he stuck to the material at hand, namely PHP, and left this material for another book. However, even though I thought of these as negatives, the information was well described and I learned a lot from these early chapters, even though it had nothing to do with PHP. As this material was presented so well I decided to give a 5 star rating.

The fact too that you can go to his web site and get updated information concerning the book was invaluable. Case in point was regarding the installation of the phpMyAdmin program. The book's description at one point was way off base, but this is because the latest version of phpMyAdmin had changed since the book came out. Going to the author's web site quickly resolved the problem as he apparently keeps it very up to date.

Overall I would highly recommend this book.