What This Book Is About
This book is for developers who want to build database applications
that are integrated with the Web. We show you the principles and
techniques for developing small- to medium-scale web database
applications that store, manage, and retrieve data. The architecture
we describe is a successful framework for applications that can run
on modest hardware and process more than a million hits per day.
We show you all of the critical tasks you need to know to build
successful web software. We cover programming fundamentals for the
Web. We show you the principles and practice of working with
databases using the SQL query language. We teach you about tracking
users with sessions, securing an application, separating presentation
from code, writing database-independent code, writing reports, adding
error handling, and advanced object-oriented and database topics.
An important feature of this book is our case study, Hugh
and Dave's Online Wines.
It's a complete but fictional online retail store
that illustrates how most of the techniques described in the book can
be put together to build a real application. The winestore
application allows users to browse and search a database of wines,
add items to a shopping cart, manage their membership, and purchase
wines. It has all the basic security, user-tracking, and
error-handling features of a real-world application. It features a
medium-size database that we use in querying examples throughout the
book.
We use Open Source software, and we show you how to use it on
Unix-based platforms such as Linux and Mac OS X, and under Microsoft
Windows 2000, 2003, and XP. Our database server is MySQL, a system
known for its suitability to applications that require speed but low
resource overheads. Our scripting language is PHP, which is best
known for its function libraries that interact with more than 15
relational database systems, the web environment, and many other
services. Apache is our web server of choice, but most other web
servers can be used successfully with MySQL, PHP, and this book.
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