Best PHP/MySQL books for a beginner?

I'd personally have to ask you to stop. Unless you want to learn these languages to modify existing projects, don't waste your time. There are better things to learn, such as Ruby on Rails or Perl.

But if you insist, I'd say you don't need books. There is a vast amount of documentation on MySQL and PHP on the internet, legal and otherwise. Don't waste your money on books for a language that isn't even complex.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Duminas

Man, I never understood the hype behind RoR. Way too complex (reminds me of ASP--ugh) and it has no use compared to the PHP and Perl I am able to do already for my applications. That and it's not supported on most hosting I've found before, so there's more marks against it for me~

PHP wasn't created with the goal of being the backend of massive web applications. It sort of grew into that. I use PHP for small things on my pages but would never try to script a forum in PHP.

And for me that's what it comes down to. I would never suggest PHP to anyone who intends on making a large web application. I don't know anything about ASP except that it exists, so I can't really compare Rails to ASP but something tells me that they're hardly similar. Ruby itself is growing quickly in popularity.

Also, Dreamhost supports Rails. I wouldn't suggest another host to anyone for any type of website. 1 TB of bandwidth for $10/mo = win. You should already be hosted by Dreamhost!

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I had Dreamhost for about six months previously; and all downtime was announced; but I personally do not recall any time I tried to visit my own site and couldn't.

For the doubters, Dreamhost has a 97 day money back guarantee. If you don't find out that your site has been down for upt to approximately (supposedly) 63 of those days before it's too late, then you're an idiot.

Also, how can you complain about an abundance of features? "I don't need this much space or bandwidth, so Dreamhost sucks! I will choose a host that costs $4/mo less instead."

I also like how I used a promo code and got a year's worth of hosting for $22.40 plus a free domain.

How ya doing, buddy?

There's really no reason to ask that here. If you google "PHP poll script" I'm sure there will be more than enough results.

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