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Businesses Books Media Databases PHP Programming Software Book Reviews IT

Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce 202

Posted by timothy from the for-not-quite-beginners dept.
norburym (Mary Norbury-Glaser) writes " Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional by Cristian Darie and Mihai Bucica is a valuable resource for the web developer/intermediate programmer who is preparing to create a database-driven e-commerce site and who is most comfortable learning by example. The authors have prepared a book with real-world application in a tutorial format; they give detailed instruction on how to create a fully developed e-commerce web site from design phase to deployment. This book is not for the raw beginner; some knowledge of PHP and MySQL is assumed and truthfully, this book will most benefit a professional web designer who has some experience building dynamic elements into web sites." If that fits you, or if you want it to, read on for the rest of Norbury-Glaser's review.
Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional
author Cristian Darie and Mihai Bucica
pages 568
publisher Apress
rating 9
reviewer Mary Norbury-Glaser
ISBN 1590593928
summary Create an E-Commerce Site Using PHP 5 and MySQL 4

The authors use a T-shirt shop scenario as their model for the design and implementation of their e-commerce site. The book is separated into three distinct "phases" of development. Phase I covers the foundations of creating the Web site, what tools to use and how to use them including creating a product catalog, incorporating a search tool, using PayPal payment processing and adding an administration interface. Phase II proceeds with enhancing the site with a custom shopping cart, a client-server ordering process, a page for pending order administration and a dynamic product recommendations system. Phase III looks at a more complicated customer accounts scenario: taking credit cards instead of using PayPal, building an order-processing pipeline, implementing credit card gateways, adding a product reviews system and accessing web services using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and REST (Representational State Transfer) XML-based protocols.

Chapter 1 introduces business strategies for considering an online commerce solution and the reasons for launching an e-commerce presence: acquiring more customers, making customers spend more and reducing the costs of fulfilling orders. A thorough read of Appendix C ("Project Management Considerations") would be a good aside at this point. This section provides excellent insight into choosing an appropriate software development cycle model for different projects with a good discussion of advantages and disadvantages of various methods and theories.

Chapters 2 through 7 constitute Phase I proper. The authors begin by tackling the basic structure of the site and focusing on flexible design, scalability and reliability. They introduce a three-tier architecture model: the presentation tier (dynamic pages that contain the elements that allow visitor to the site to interact effectively with the business end), the business or middle tier (requests for data that are posed by the visitor are passed on by the presentation tier to the data tier) and the data tier (manages the data and sends appropriate responses back to the business tier when requested).

Chapter 2 lays the groundwork for the reader to establish the TShirtShop site and accompanying database. Installation instructions for Apache 2, PHP 5, MySQL 4 and phpMyAdmin are referenced to Appendix A. Instructions for installing other tools used in this book - the Smarty template framework for PHP and PEAR DB - are included within Chapter 2. I quite admire the authors' choice to use Smarty. Smarty parses templates behind the scenes and creates PHP scripts from them so when a Web page is rendered, Smarty reads from the PHP scripts instead of pulling the templates themselves, eliminating run-time parsing of templates. Smarty also has built-in caching of template outputs, which saves on overhead in retrieving data from the database.

After creating the main index.php page and the index.tpl Smarty template, the authors discuss error handling and reporting (with a nod to PHP's often head-scratching error messages). They provide a nice set of instructions here for creating an efficient error handling/reporting scheme. The last step in Chapter 2 is to load phpMyAdmin and create the new tshirtshop database and an admin user.

From this point forward, the authors structure each chapter to adhere to the three-tier model. Implementing the presentation tier, the business tier and the data tier is an integral part of the construction of the site. The reader is encouraged to begin every major aspect of the project with these elements in mind.

Chapters 3 and 4 lead the reader through the creation of the product catalog for the TShirtShop site. The authors give a brief overview of SQL, relational databases, using PEAR DB and Smarty plug-ins. The first table is created and populated with data, PEAR DB is used to access the data and a Smarty template is used to implement the user interface. Multiple tables are then added to enhance product catalog features, which allows for a discussion of table relationships. Filtering SQL results and joining data tables are then examined in the section on implementing the data tier.

Chapter 5 introduces a product search engine to the site by using MySQL to search the database and using Smarty templates to build the user interface. This is a major component of any e-commerce site and the authors prepare an excellent code set for this purpose by using the full-text searching functionality of MySQL. The pros and cons of this versus using LIKE are also discussed.

Chapter 6, "Receiving Payments Using PayPal", will be of great interest to many readers. Many individual proprietors and small businesses don't have the resources to process credit cards and therefore use Internet Payment Service Providers to process transactions. In this chapter, the authors teach the reader how to create a new PayPal account, how to integrate the PayPal shopping cart and custom checkout and how to configure PayPal to automatically calculate shipping costs. There is a bit of missing code in this chapter but it appears correctly on this book's Apress errata page (apress.com).

The last chapter of Phase I covers implementation of a catalog administration page using componentized templates and a simple authentication scheme for administrator access to the page.

By the completion of Phase I, the design and programming for a completely functional e-commerce site is in place.

Phase II begins with a pros and cons discussion of using a simple cart method like PayPal versus creating a custom shopping cart and checkout to enhance flexibility. There are some neat tricks here including storing the cart ID as a cookie on the client.

In Chapters 8 and 9, the reader learns how to store cart info in the database, how to implement a client-side ordering mechanism and an orders administration page for pending orders. The benefit to this is that since the data is now stored in the database, quantitative analysis and tracking can be done based on the products sold.

In Chapter 10, the authors add product recommendations to their TShirtShop site. This dynamic visitor-specific functionality is an excellent sales strategy intended to boost sales by adding suggestions for upgrading a purchase or complementing a purchase with another product. The items recommended are based on what products were ordered together by other customers. The SQL query to get the list of products is very nicely done!

This concludes Phase II and the site is again fully functional but with some neat new enhancements: the site has its own shopping cart, credit card processing is accomplished through PayPal and an orders administration page and product recommendations system have been added. Many individually run or small businesses may stop at this point and be completely content with the e-commerce site that has been developed so far. But the authors proceed with more complex scenarios by offering Phase III: "Processing Orders and Adding Features". This final section of the book deals with processing credit cards, using SSL to encrypt data transactions, storing customer accounts, adding a customer product review system (think Amazon.com) and using XML Web services to integrate Amazon.com products into the site.

The authors spend some time covering the design of the order pipeline and optimizing the logical sequence of tasks that need to be tracked. Chapter 12 deals with the modifications necessary to the enable pipeline processing and the database schema changes for auditing and storing data. Chapter 13 implements the pipeline sections in preparation for adding full credit card transaction functionality in Chapter 14 and rounds out with the creation of a new orders admin page that shows an audit trail for any particular order stored in the database.

Full implementation of credit card orders is completed in Chapter 14. The authors discuss credit card transaction fundamentals including working with credit card payment gateways, understanding transactions and card processing. They look at two payment services providers as examples: DataCash (a UK-based company) and Payflow Pro (a division of Verisign).

Product review integration is the subject of Chapter 15. This is another highly coveted enhancement to e-commerce sites. The authors provide a very simple (and therefore, elegant, in my view) implementation of code to add review capabilities to the sample site.

The final chapter of the book is Chapter 16, "Connecting to Web Services", where the authors complete their professionally developed TShirtShop e-commerce site by integrating the Amazon E-Commerce Service using SOAP and REST.

Appendices A-C cover necessary application installation (as mentioned above), hosting advice, steps for getting your files where they need to be on various hosting models and project management theory. Access to code and errata is available on the Apress Web site (apress.com). This book has a nice layout, clean typography, plenty of screen shots and the code sets are offset from the main body of text and are extremely easy to follow. The book can readily be propped open while looking on from your development machine and the overall size of the book isn't unwieldy or awkward to place on a surface.

In the The Expert's Voice in Open Source series, Apress has harnessed the knowledge and expertise of some of the best folks in open source and this book is no exception. Cristian Darie has previously written several well-regarded volumes (Programmer's Guide to SQL, Beginning ASP.NET E-Commerce, Visual C# .NET: A Guide for VB6 Developers, among others) and his skill in untangling complex subject matter is apparent in Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce. Both authors have prepared a book that will enable any intermediate developer to create a fully functional e-commerce Web site that they can then customize and extend. This book is consistent, well organized and clearly presented. Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional is the perfect tutorial-style book for start-to-finish e-commerce site development instruction for any developer with the desire to learn the advanced tools and techniques to get a scalable professional site designed and in production.

You can purchase Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce More

Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce

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  • my God! (Score:3, Funny)

    by east coast ( 590680 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2005 @03:23PM (#12027769)
    Now that was a lengthy blurb.

  • Holy Shit (Score:2, Insightful)

    by pHatidic ( 163975 )
    Talk about a shameless plug, they put the entire review on the front page!

  • that's it! (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by M1FCJ ( 586251 )
    Right. What the heck is this? Couldn't you post less into the intro of the article? I'm fed up with sloppy editors in /. (What? Am I new here? Who's asking?)

  • Poor editing (Score:4, Funny)

    by The Amazing Fish Boy ( 863897 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2005 @03:24PM (#12027789) Homepage Journal
    That front page entry is too damn short. How am I supposed to have any idea of what lies behind the "Read More" link?
  • Is there any reason why the entire review is showing up on the slashdot.org front page?

    Someone needs to clip it down...
  • Mah, the internets are broke or sumfin. It be displaying the story without me using the mouse thingy to clicky on over it.
  • Now THAT is what I call a front page advertisement :)

  • TMF? (Score:1)

    by jabella ( 91754 ) *
    how did it get out of 'The Mysterious Future' in this condition?

    weird.

  • So Mr OWL (Score:3, Funny)

    by jmazzi ( 869663 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2005 @03:27PM (#12027849) Homepage
    "So Mr Owl, how many mouse scrolls does it take to get to the end of this slashdot post?" "one twohoo, three, four, five, six, seven......"
  • Its someone's time to learn PHP and MySQL.
  • Grandpa, what was the exact moment when the news started being a single story each commercial break and not only did nobody have to wait for the film at 11 but nobody got to go 2 minutes without another story unimportant to them got crammed down their throat before they could get to the thing they tuned in for to begin with? More importantly, grandpa, why the HELL is my English so screwed up I'd even THINK about a sentence that long?
  • Let's see if the length of the threads talking about the oversize length of the blurb will end up being longer than the blurb was. ;-)

  • why stop with the review (Score:4, Funny)

    by tmbailey123 ( 230145 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2005 @03:29PM (#12027889)
    Hell why not and cut and paste the contents of the book too while your at it !!
  • Are you getting payed to pimp this garbage?
    • > Are you getting payed to pimp this garbage?

      In fact, they are. Notice the affiliate links on all book reviews. Used to be Amazon, but BN apparently pays them more now.
  • What's the point of the Read More link?
  • Slashdot looks different.
    I've already rebooted so don't tell me that will fix the problem.
    Guess I'll just spend the afternoon reinstalling Windows98 again.

  • Don't bother... (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by nebaz ( 453974 )
    Making comments about the errors in the blurb if any appear. They will eventually be fixed, possibly silently, and the people looking at the article later will wonder what the big deal is.

  • Why oh why? (Score:5, Informative)

    by JohnA ( 131062 ) <johnanderson.gmail@com> on Wednesday March 23, 2005 @03:33PM (#12027961) Homepage
    Why someone would want to write their own shopping cart is beyond me... as someone who does just that full-time *cough*UltraCart [ultracart.com]*cough*, I can tell you that proper e-commerce implementation & security is hard. Even beyond the traditional web application security issues, running a shopping cart is like placing a large shooting target squarely on your website.

    Also, usability is a large factor. Unless you're Jakob Nielsen, you are likely to overlook some design choices that will result in lost sales and lost opportunity. Unfortuantely, all too often the person writing the card is not the one that should be doing the site design.

    If you don't want to spend the money for a hosted or installed cart, there are some free / OSS alternatives such as ZenCart [zen-cart.com] or OSCommerce [oscommerce.com].

    The bottom line is that most stores don't need the hassle, cost, and complexity of a custom cart solution. Remember to look at total cost of ownership.

    • Even better... (Score:3, Informative)

      by DogDude ( 805747 )
      Well, those solutions still require some heavy duty expertise to get going. Then, you still have to find some way of dealing with secure online credit card processing (or just securely send the credit cards to the merchant for manual entry), database issues, etc. Everybody that I know that wants to sell stuff online I just point to Yahoo Shopping. It works, it's undeniably the easiest thing out there, and its customizeable enough for probably 80% of the people out there wanting an online store.

      • I disagree... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by centipetalforce ( 793178 )
        I have absolutely no expertise with PHP or Mysql, and I setup zencart in under 2 weeks for a client. Yeah, you have to edit some PHP files with some overrides sometimes for maximum customizability, but it's all HTML and all the help you need are at the extremely helpful ZenCart forums. Zencart has way more features than most ecommerce stores need, OSS, and you can use it with any host that supports Mysql and PHP. Yahoo costs at least $30 a month... a ripoff.
      • "Everybody that I know that wants to sell stuff online I just point to Yahoo Shopping."

        And if anyone is interested in that success, there's book about e-commerce webdesign [greenspun.com] from the guy who wrote Yahoo! Shopping.
    • I agree. I was just about to post the same question myself. We use Zen Cart at our company and it's worked really great. We went from unpacking the tar file to our first transaction in two weeks.
    • This isn't for the folks running an Mom/Pop e-commerce site. This is for the proto-Web Guru that wants to improve his/her skill set.

      Ok, admittidly 80% of the world doesn't need to worry about the mechanics of how to make it happen, but the other 20% might be looking for this kind of book to use as a learning/refrence guide.

    • not that you have a vested interest in people not writing their own stuff or anything....

    • Re:Why oh why? (Score:3, Informative)

      by n3bulous ( 72591 )
      Take a peek at the code for OS Commerce. It is nightmarish. In fact, after looking at it today, I'm hoping I sleep well.

      Plus, it REQUIRES register_globals which is a huge security risk. However, they are smart enough to use transactions (or at least the presence of innodb tables...) And, if I remember correctly, they store credit card numbers in the clear... Also, the last official release was in 2003 (2004 if you count the OSC Max version at aabox.com)

      What's nice is it installs very easily.

  • Timothy!!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by His name cannot be s ( 16831 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2005 @03:34PM (#12027971) Journal
    I've had it. I'm blackballing Timothy

    The master of dupes has now just crossed the line into master of stupidity.

    *watches his karma go down faster than a $2 vegas whore.*

    • You probably would have been modded down if you hadn't referenced your karma.

      There's a trend on /. that any time you mention your karma going down, you get modded up.

      Now, I'll probably get modded down for telling you this...
  • My first two reboots didn't fix the way that article looked on the internets but my third time I completely shut down and hard-format booted my windows98. Now it looks right.
    I'm a whiz at fixing computers

  • Its not like we are all sitting at are computers trying to be the first to post on a news story and forbid there be a error in the post.... or are we.....

    Oh wait I am one of those sitting at my computer waiting to post.....

  • The title of the book is Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional. I guess everybody has to start some where, but there is something worrying about someone learning their e-Commerce coding out of a book like that.

    Oh, and since nobody else has pointed it out, I think the whole review is on the front page.
  • Oh yeah, just one more week! http://conf.phpquebec.org/ [phpquebec.org] You can't miss this if you're serious about PHP (whoa, never thought I'd hear myself say that).
  • I can't shake the feeling that this article and Roblimo's open source chronic are connected somehow.

  • groundbreaking! (Score:3, Funny)

    by geekschmoe ( 244913 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2005 @03:39PM (#12028041)
    There are some neat tricks here including storing the cart ID as a cookie on the client.

    you didn't really read this chapter and just wanted to make sure you wrote something about each one, huh?

  • Oh wow! (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by GreyWolf3000 ( 468618 )
    Every single post is a comment about the front page screw up. How hilarious!
  • Sub-topic: "We ramble, so you don't have to."

  • Don't start from scratch (Score:5, Informative)

    by kbahey ( 102895 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2005 @04:01PM (#12028298) Homepage

    If you need ecommerce, or any web application for that matter, then there is no point in starting from scratch.

    There are plenty of platforms or frameworks out there that you can build on.

    My own favorite is Drupal [drupal.org] which is not just a Content Management System, but rather an open framework.

    For example, some creative guy wrote an Ecommerce [drupal.org] set of modules for Drupal, so it can do just that.

  • I've been looking forwards to getting into PHP5 for a while now, but for the time being I'm stuck developing in PHP4, because the majority of my costumers' hosting providers haven't upgraded yet. Does anybody have any good providers to recommend that support it?

  • Is there any PHP book *not* for beginners? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LetterJ ( 3524 ) <j@wynia.org> on Wednesday March 23, 2005 @04:22PM (#12028520) Homepage
    The market's been flooded for *years* with intro PHP books. Where are all of the books covering even intermediate topics using PHP?

    Stuff like: Bayesian inference [ibm.com], Probability models [ibm.com], Web site user modeling [ibm.com], etc.

    All of those examples are from the same author (the guy in charge of phpmath.com [phpmath.com]), but go to show that there are actually interesting things being done with PHP.

    I'd love to see some books that *don't* spend 200 pages explaining how to get to fetching an array from MySQL.

    • What types of topics would you look for in an 'advanced' book? I do agree with you - the overwhelming mass of PHP books are all 'beginner' targetted (beginner programming and/or beginner with PHP). I don't want yet another book that tells me how to set up MySQL, thank you.

      To that end, one PHP book that did have some good advanced sections was George Schlossnagle's book "Advanced PHP Programming" (I think that's the title).

      Recently, a colleague of mine wrote a path finding algorithm in PHP to be able to

  • chapter on security? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bad-badtz-maru ( 119524 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2005 @04:39PM (#12028737) Homepage
    I suspect that the ecommerce solution a novice would come up with, using this book for guidance, would have an unacceptably high potential for exploitation. For example, look at the cookie discussion alone. Cart information does not belong in a cookie. A session token, and really nothing else, does. Any time an ecommerce developer reinvents the wheel and ignores "best practices" you can be almost certain that vulnerable code will result.

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