First off, excellent books. I've read 2 of your other ones as well. They have been helpful, and your way of explaining things gets through to me where other authors have not.
I have been working on an ecommerce site for a few months now. I bought your book to assist me with the shopping cart part of it because I'm fairly new to programming, and I know how critical the actual cart and payment stuff is. I also prefer to not have user registration except for the admin part of it. So my questions are: I may be looking at this wrong, but I was wondering if the carts table you have designed in your book will be storing the same user_session_id multiple times for each different item in their cart? On the page with the db design, there is a note that customers may be repeated in customers table. A couple pages later, after you have explained about the shopping cart, there is a tip that says customers may be repeated in customers table. Is this a mistake? Should it say carts table?
I sort of figured I just didn't understand this, and I created a less elaborate scheme where one table will more or less give me what i need by just putting cookie id, prod id, and qty in one table, and by using joins i can generate what's in their cart. If they checkout, I can then save the necessary order info to an orders table. Is this a bad way to do it, and if so, will you explain how I might be misunderstanding the carts part of your db setup. My book is the kindle edition bought off amazon. Thanks in advance.
