PHP and MySQL web development by Welling and Thomson was released in 2001, at almost 900 pages [1]. It was my entry to PHP and database programming and the book I find most often on PHP programmers’ bookshelves, usually sitting next to a copy of MySQL by Paul DuBois [2]. This first text explained PHP 4 to millions of programmers, bringing them into the new world of web page programming using an interpreter (PHP) instead of CGI (the common gateway interface to C programs, not computer-generated imagery). These were the days of blinking text and scrolling marquees.

The first edition of the book under review was released in 2006 [3]. It came in at 488 pages and targeted PHP 5, with workarounds in case you were still running PHP 4.3. Blinking text and scrolling marquees were banned by this point, and web programmers were exploring object-oriented principles and code reuse. Security was also becoming an issue, so a chapter on encrypted passwords was provided.

Now, 12 years after the first edition and at a time in which some web pundits claim that PHP is dead, we have the fourth edition. Why? Is this book series still relevant?

The answer is yes. First of all, PHP isn’t even close to dead. It’s still one of the ten most-used programming languages in the world, and most websites with an identifiable server-side language are written in PHP (you can Google these claims). Second, other newer languages and frameworks are buoyed by their discovery buzz, but PHP is still easy to learn and a great bridge from web clients to databases. Finally, the move to PHP 7 by the community and this author are significant; a PHP 5 reference is no longer good enough to program the latest version of the language.

This latest edition is still around 500 pages, divided into 12 chapters. It covers every aspect of PHP programming, including accessing databases from PHP and PHP secure coding issues like SQL injection. The coverage of PHP is excellent. However, most dynamic websites now use JavaScript front ends with PHP back ends; there are no pure PHP sites. This book does not cover mixed-language programming using JavaScript, AJAX, and JSON. I can understand the author believing 500 pages are enough and that JavaScript is outside the domain of a PHP book, but if you really want “dynamic web design” in 2019, you need to know how to balance JavaScript with PHP. Welling and Thomson cover it under “Advanced PHP Topics” in their 2017 edition [4]; O’Reilly focuses an entire book on the topic in Learning PHP, MySQL & JavaScript (5th ed.) by Robin Nixon [5]. While this text is good, it may not be good enough.

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