I have decided I want to branch out my database knowledge a bit and start learning a little about developing in SQL. I was particularly thinking about learning PHP.

Does anyone know of some good books on this kind of stuff?

Since PHP and SQL seem to go hand in hand, there are a few books available. I just finished a college class that approached both, and the book we used was "PHP 5 / MySQL Programming for the Absolute Beginner" by Andy Harris.

This is a great book with lots of humor in it. Although it says "for the absolute beginner", I felt that it wasn't quite true. Right off the bat, you have to (obviously) install and configure PHP, and (optionally) Apache. Once you've got it set up, you're good to go, but I had a difficult time in the beginning. The book said "if you are having difficulty getting PHP to run, consult the documentation that came with PHP". Although the documentation that came with PHP clearly explains how to configure, I was expecting the book to mention it instead. It helps to have at least a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS before reading.

It mainly deals with PHP, and the last few chapters are for SQL. Although, it does a good teaching you the concepts and principles of SQL. SO, if you wanted to branch out and learn more, all you'd really need is a reference on other commands.

Howdy, dude! Well, I learned PHP and MySQL from dowloading the reference manuals and some online tutorials but would not consider myself expert yet. The gist of how it works is that you use PHP to compose SQL statement strings which are sent to your server using a php function (such as mysql_query( ). I tend to work primarily in PHP and just use basic SELECT, INSERT, and UPDATE commands in SQL but it's best to know as much of both as you can.

Here's a tutorial I found afterward that may help, too...

http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql

Also, I recently worked with someone developing an ASP.NET/SQL SERVER project and was somewhat disoriented. Some of the MySQL SQL I learned would not work with SQL Server and I didn't like the compling process though I could see how that would give you a little more speed. PHP is very flexible and forgiving and I'm glad I took the trouble to learn it.

--ST

Thanks for the info. I've been working on setting up my computer with PHP and MySQL, so I can start testing things out. I've almost finished setting up a secondary linux system to run those on an Apache server, so I can practice without spending a bunch of money on proprietary software.