Terry

Hey Thanks Guys, I have been coding PHP and MySQL for a long time, you would think I would actually know or remember this. Looking at the code, in context it does make sense and the explanation both of you gave hit it home for me. What I like about this book is that it is actually teaching me better programming by real world usage and context, where many many other books just give a bunch of examples like reading php.net examples. Going through this book I am trying to learn things that I missed or are missing in my knowledge bank. I didn't really understand the defines in the config file BEFORE, I have seen them many places like wordpress but I never really understood understood exactly what was going on. I saw it, I used the code before but mostly copy paste type of thing. Going through the first part of the book, right now, I get it now. Small things like this really helps, ya know? A community like this that you can actually ask, maybe stupid questions and get great responses back is really appreciated. Thanks.

I mean actually setting a value for that field and having it automatically populated with a value of NULL or 0 or even blank empty space? Why does blank empty space a better option than setting NULL to the field itself or is that also a bad idea?

From reading in the book and posts in the forum I understand having table fields set as NULL is bad and takes up more resources or processing power than table fields that are not set to NULL. I don't understand this really, the backend of MySQL and why this would be bad. Can you explain this a little further, I mean how MySQL looks at the types and values in a field and why NULL makes the engine work a little harder OR is that not exactly what is going on when it reaches a field that is set to NULL. So, if I have a field that can in fact have no value set to it then it is better to actually set a value for that field with default or NULL or empty space or something such as a 0 instead of clicking the set to null checkmark in phpMyAdmin when manually creating table fields that way or setting to NULL in SQL syntax? Thanks.

I am manually typing from the book, I am at the beginning of Section Two and am just beginning the Paypal project. I am typing manually because I learn better doing it than just reading it. I did not enter the quotes as ` instead I used ' then I switched all the quotes to ` as I was getting errors and then I still got errors until I compared what was in the book and the downloaded project SQL to what I manually typed. How does MySQL treat ` versus ' ? From experiencing this I gather the ' ' is in quoting something specific you want to enter into the database either as a value OR assigned to the format of the value, table field. BUT, what does the side quotes mean to MySQL? why the difference between them? Thanks.

I do NOT know Yii so I maybe stepping out of line with answering this but strictly for the SQL call this is what you need SELECT * FROM 'database_name.table_name' WHERE block = 'block-b' That will retrieve all records from the table that are categorized as being in block-b. That is strictly the SQL statement though I do not know what form Yii would need that in.

I see you like Adobe Air and wondered if you have tried any of the 3rd Party Flash Wrappers designed for creating windows based software? Not sure if you are familiar with this product but I have been using it for several years and it is actually an amazing product and actually beats out it's competition for pretty much every category except it is strictly for Windows OS and isn't cross platform and they have no plans to make it cross platform. http://www.northcode.com creators of SWF Studio. Someone should really create a book about this product because it is really amazing for creating really, ANY kind of software with. It is not web based but you can use it to communicate with a PHP application for instance that communicates with a database and update database entries etc... that is just one example of the things you can do with it. I know you have 1000 other book projects, just throwing out something you may find interesting. It is a commercial software so it is not free, cost is around the $300.00 range but they did recently release a prior version for free though it is not strictly open source, no access to the source code or anything and there is no official support for it. It is one of those diamonds you come across every so often, really is a great company and awesome product. Didn't know if you knew about it, but since you are interested in Adobe Air, this kind of takes that to an entirely different level for Windows based software development. Thanks.

That's actually an awesome story. LOL Since 6 doesn't officially exist then I guess this isn't really off topic. I just got an email about an upcoming feature in 5.3.6, apparently it will have a built-in webserver so people don't need to install apache for their testing environments to run PHP. Just saw that today and have not looked into that any further. That actually sounds pretty cool. Thanks.

This maybe a dense question but the majority of hosts don't offer version 6 as of now, March 2011, my host has most of it's servers still on 5.2.9 and many others are using 5.3.2 to 5.3.4. If this is going to be like adoption from version 4 to 5 we have another 3 to 4 years yet before 6 becomes main stream, unless I am missing something. I am just now learning 5.2.x variant and later will be focusing on 5.3.x+ specific stuff. I remember when 6 was released and that was several years ago so I guess it will be very mature when everyone starts adopting as mainstream version. Am I missing something or am I completely behind this stuff and don't even know how far behind I am? I know it's off topic but I have been wondering about this for sometime and you seem to be the person to ask, Larry. Thanks.

Yeah, I looked into what my host offers. For 100.00 per year I can get an SSL with dedicated IP all setup and configured for me Per domain. Once I get to the testing stages of my scripts and get my products in place, I will order that up and be ready. fyi, I just ordered Effortless E-Commerce with PHP and MySQL as well as the Building a Web Site with Ajax: Visual QuickProject from Amazon earlier this morning. Should be here sometime Friday. Thanks.

I have some questions for those of you using paypal without an SSL. Have you noticed any issues sending and receiving data back and forth from paypal without the SSL? Such as rejected calls etc? What method are you using to do this and are you using the basic version, paypal express etc..? curl, html encoded urls? Tbanks.

I don't know where to put this question so am adding it here. I contacted my host and they are using 5.2.9 of PHP because the servers they have upgraded to php 5.3.x have all experienced a performance hit. They said that it is not a major decrease but that it intensifies on shared hosting which my sites are on, they went into further comment on it stating that cPanel also recommends staying at 5.2 due to the performance issue. Have you experienced this issue and if so how much of a degradation have you experienced using 5.3.x over the 5.2.X version? My host didn't give me percentages just said it was noticeable. - T

Hi Larry, I have a few questions about this particular title. I am currently in the middle of building a new CMS and shopping cart with built-in forum and other goodies to run my sites with. I came across a link to this book today during my research time and have some questions about it. I have a business paypal account and the new software I am building I would like to use it first with the basic version of paypal then later paypal pro. Does your book go into using and implementing the basic version of paypal or is it strictly paypal pro? I understand the advantages of pro but I would like to really understand implementation of both because in some situations, sites, I would only need the basic and on other sites the pro so a well rounded tutorial on both would be something I would be interested in and wondered which you primarily focus on and if you go into both at all or just pro. Paypal made some changes to their system over the last few months, changing how they accept calls I guess with a Ajax implementation. I don't really understand it or looked into it, just something I have heard and briefly read about. Do you go into these changes on your site anywhere to supplement what you have written in the book? The last time I implemented paypal into a site I used a webform that sent the data through the URL with price etc... I read some on your old forum and I guess this is not the way to do it anymore. I spoke with a developer a month or so ago and he said that he uses CURL to pass info, do you go into this at all with your book? There was some talk in the old forum about htaccess rewrites, I looked at the overview on amazon.com and in the index it shows 2 pages for htaccessfile but examples given in the forum were to me to be a bit advanced for only 2 pages. How much detail do you go to in the book about rewrites in htaccess? My host currently only offers 5.2.X version of PHP, on my testing environment I use vertrigo which is easiest implementation of LAMP, actually AMP, and only one I ever got htaccess to work with on my windows xp/7 computers, I have installed php 5.2.7 and mysql 5 something community version. I just recently learned how to install pear into it and it is more identical to my webhost account than ever. With this setup would I have any problems using the examples in your book or would I need to do some research of my own to figure out difference between PHP 5.3 and 5.2? Why Paypal does not provide a ready made API we can download and implement into our sites I do not know, the examples I ever find are from 2005 or so that do not work with the newest version of their system. I understand the arguement about too many ways or using paypal and so many 3rd party software etc etc... But there are only certain ways you can actually process orders and pass info back and forth between the various flavors of Paypal. Why can't they just come up with something that works and then developers can take it and customize to their needs instead of having us hunt and learn and figure it all out on our own with their 500 versions of documentation written in 2004 or whatever, drives me crazy. Something like your book is what I am in strong need of that goes into actually making process transactions work but I need to do it with both version basic and pro, first basic though. I am sure arguements to only use pro but if that were only option they wouldn't offer the basic version... Paypal coding drives me nuts and has me pulling my hair out. Greatfully I am not at that stage in my project yet but it is coming up fast. Thank you for you time and the amount of effort you go through to teach us up and comers how to use all this technology the correct way.