Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to...

…helpful in understanding how to achieve these common tasks in building an e-commerce web site.

— Jason Gabriele

Beginning PHP 5 E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional is an ideal reference for intermediate PHP 5 and MySQL developers, and programmers familiar with web development technologies. This book covers every step of the design and build process, and provides rich examples that will enable you to build high-quality, extendable e-commerce websites. Take a peek at an actual book example!

Furthermore, this book covers site building in three phases. Phase one results in a live website, with an attractive interface and fully searchable product catalog. Next, phase two explains adding facilities to increase sales through cross-selling, upselling, and enhancing customer service. Finally, phase three seeks to reduce costs through automated order processing and integrating with other systems via XML Web services.

About The Author
Cristian Darie is a software engineer with experience in a wide range of modern technologies, and the author of numerous books, including his popular ASP.NET C# E-Commerce tutorial, his AJAX and PHP tutorial, and his SEO tutorial for PHP developers. Cristian is studying distributed application architectures for his PhD, and is getting involved with various commercial and research projects. When not planning to buy Google, he enjoys his bit of social life. If you want to say "Hi," you can reach Cristian through his personal website, http://www.cristiandarie.ro.

Mihai Bucica started programming and competing in programming contests (winning many of them), all at age twelve. With a bachelor's degree in computer science from the Automatic Control and Computers Faculty of the Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania, Bucica works as an Outsourcing Project Manager for Galaxy Soft SRL. Even after working with a multitude of languages and technologies, Bucica's programming language of choice remains C++, and he loves the LGPL word.

Reader Reviews
The other reviewers did not emphasize a point I did not grasp until I bought the book. The book does not just introduce Smarty as a concept. A major trust of the book is Smarty. It could even be argued that the book is really about using Smarty for e-commerce and how to write PHP code to support Smarty. There is very little MySQL-specific info (mainly just an introduction to PEAR DB and use of standard SQL queries). If you are not planning to use Smarty for presentation templating, there is not much to be gained from reading this book. If you are going to use Smarty, then this book offers a cookbook approach with some theory. As I will not be using Smarty in my project, I am dissapointed in the book and have gleaned just a few new ideas. Reading this book has also confirmed my decision to not use Smarty. In my opinion, Smarty needlessly adds a level of complexity on top of the PHP code and is not designed for editing in WYSIWYG editors such as Dreamweaver. There are several templating engines that are simpler to learn and use than Smarty (eg, Flexy). It seems to me that the whole book would have benefited from using a simpler templating engine and making the book less dependent on a single method of presentation (ie, Smarty). Comment | | (Report this)