Oreilly usually does great, but these authors completely blew it!!!

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Book:		Learning PHP & MySQL
Subject:		Oreilly usually does great, but these authors completely blew it!!!
Date:		2008-10-21 13:10:31
From:		Jack_Man

Rating: I realize it's an introductory book, but the authors wrote the book as if it were for 3rd graders, repeating passages and phrases over and over and over! Were they just trying to meet the page requirements or something? And this is the 2nd Edition!!!!!!!!! I have some Suse, RHEL, HPUX, Ubuntu and FedoraCore9 Linux experience, Apache HTTP experience, Java programming experience, C++, etc, etc, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and Informix skills. Don't buy this book if you really want to learn PHP and MySQL, especially if you don't have much programming experience. I've wasted approximately 52 hours total (so far) on errors and serious technical flaws throughout the book. Just like some of the other reviewers have said, the installation procedures were completely messed up. Obviously I didn't need to go through all the steps for Linux, but I also tried hosting on my Windows XP laptop. The figures that supposedly help to clarify the coding explanations are completely asinine (inanely foolish). To quote the book on page 16, "Many Linux distributions install Apache, PHP, and MySQL by default, so you may not even need to install them. If this looks too daunting, try XAMPP." What? Everything is already installed and working on my Fedora box! How could that be "daunting" and why whould I want to try "XAMPP"? Anyway, I don't want to waste anymore of my time. I have about 15 other O'Reilly titles, and those were excellent or good. I think O'Reilly somehow got conned into letting these authors write this book. "DON'T BUY THIS BOOK!"