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Does Anyone Know a Good Book that Covers MySQLi Programming?


Cougar
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I've spent a bunch of money on new PHP books, and I've inherited three more that also cover PHP 5. Then after I began reading them, I discovered that best practices are that we don't use mysql programming, but that we upgrade to mysqli programming.

 

Unfortunately, not one of the books I bought covers the MySQLi extension and how to program with it. When I Google for a book that covers the "improved" mysql, and when I go to Amazon and use the "search inside" feature, it's only covered in an appendix or an occasional mention, like an afterthought.

 

Although I'm a newbie at PHP, I was a senior technical writer at Fujitsu and Brodia in the pre-crash economy, I wrote sections about programming in a book about Cold Fusion, I wrote a production-ready JDBC class and JavaScript adapter for it while at Fujitsu, and I did hobby programming in C#, VB6, and Java.

 

So I'm no slouch.

 

But I do not find the manual at mysql.com to be very helpful, because it doesn't explain enough:

See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/apis-php-mysqli.html

 

The best resource I've found on the internet is the php manual on the phpbuilder.com website, but it also doesn't explain things that I, as a newbie, need to know:

http://phpbuilder.com/manual/en/book.mysqli.php

 

These materials aren't really very good tutorials. The phpbuilder materials are the best of all of them, but there's a lot that is not well explained, and I'm still struggling to just learn the basics.

 

All of the groovy new books I've bought are with the old version of coding. So I'm trying to learn PHP and simultaneously translate all of the mysql commands into the best practices improved mysqli.

 

Is there anything that you can recommend to me? A book in which ALL of the sample coding is done with the mysqli extensions? A book that doesn't require me to crawl through it translating clear samples into samples that don't work until I've worried it to death?

 

Why isn't this need obvious in the industry? On the NetBeans site, there's a CRUD example using the older version, and there's a button at the bottom of each page to provide feedback. So I left a very polite suggestion that perhaps the sample coding on the NetBeans site should use what MySQL.com says is best practices, and the person who responded was initially annoyed with me for making that suggestion (and then apologized, when I pointed this out).

 

How do I learn this stuff? Does the industry disagree with the MySQL development team that says that using the mysqli extension is best practices? Why am I getting this strange response when I'm trying to avoid starting out my work using obsolete coding practices?

 

What can you recommend?

 

Thanks in advance.

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I don’t do books!

I don’t do best practices.

However like you I do frustration in this context.

Trouble is what is recommended is not what’s is implemented.

It’s the king’s new cloths.

 

Reverse polish notation was the way forward.

FORTRAN and lisp were best practices.

Throw in a bit of Algol you have it made.

 

My real point! Broaden your Goggle search and look for professional programmers and the sites and forums they occupy.

 

I know there are professional programmers on this forum that I hope will pick up this challenge and answer your questions.

 

All the best

Ric :)

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Thanks, Megan,

 

My problem with the source that you listed is that it doesn't explain things that I know will be important to me as a newbie, such as defining the statement commands and the results commands and how to interact with the connection pool. However, it's a great API, and provides a good reference for required parameters, etc.

 

In my continued searching, I found someone on a support forum who was referring to code that he had found in the book "PHP and MySQL Web Development, 4th Edition," by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson which was full of mysqli commands.

 

I found this on Scribd at this link:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/15016825/PHP-and...ent-4th-Edition

and on Scribd, it is listed as having a Attribution Non-commercial Copyright, which I can't confirm or deny.

 

I don't know if this book answers my questions completely, but starting on page 270 in Chapter 11, mysqli commands are used in the tutorial examples, as well as the production project examples that start on page 583, Chapter 27.

 

I hope this information is helpful to other people. If anyone else has anything to offer to this discussion, please add it, because there really is a dearth of good instruction with the mysqli extensions.

 

I guess even a newbie like myself can share useful information with the open source PHP community--even before I really know anything about what I'm learning.

 

Thanx,

Cougar

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