I have read two books from different publishers and authors on this subject. The other is called Build Your own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL from Sitepoint, i recommend that book. I believe sitepoint is one of the better publishers for beginners and their newer books are very well written. Compared to PHPSolutions I believe that this book shows much better methods of organization and gives the reader a better understanding of the subjects. His writing is very elegant and would be very good for a beginner but yet after reading another book on php and mysql i am still learning valuable techniques and strategies from this book.
This book focuses a little more on styling a functioning website, the author brings up points that will work for the site he is creating, but will probably not work in sites you create and you will need to change a lot of the code. The Sitepoint version of this book offers greater understanding of the topic and less focus on making a site then creating a working database and site that retrieves it. One thing i do like about Phpsolutions is how it included PDO instead of just the mysqli connection method. Although allot of the book was devoted to describe each connection method.
I hope this review will make you consider looking at the sitepoint website, and another great thing about sitepoint is they offer large previews of their books so you can see what you are getting into.
Author(s): David Powers
Edition: 1st ed. 2006. Corr. 3rd printing
Publisher: friends of ED
Year: 2006
Language: English
Pages: 487