In this edition…

• About The Previous Newsletter
• About This Newsletter
• On the Web => Typenator, Text Expander, and Breevy
• On the Blog => E-Commerce Stored Procedures, Continued
• Q&A => How do I Secure Sensitive Information on Shared Hosts?
• Q&A => When Should I Create MySQL Indexes?
• What is Larry Thinking? => Proxy Scripts
• Book Giveaway => Results
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => “Effortless E-Commerce”, “PHP for the Web”, and More!

About the Previous Newsletter

First, I should point out that I’m not going to start every newsletter with a discussion of the previous one. But because the last newsletter used a new system (mandated, in part, by problems with the previous newsletter), quality issues are still on my mind. I think the previous newsletter was relatively glitch-free, so I feel comfortable moving ahead with this new system (it’s Campaign Monitor). If you have any problems with this or future newsletters, please do let me know. Thanks!

I updated WordPress this morning and then attempted to install a new plug-in. At that point, things went haywire. I’m fixing things as I catch them, but I apologize for the oddities. Please let me know if you see anything amiss (you can comment to this post). Thanks!

, I presented an alternative version of the stored procedures—and the PHP scripts that call them—for Chapter 9, “Building a Shopping Cart.” Those procedures aren’t too complex either. In this post, I’ll rewrite the stored procedures and update the PHP scripts that call them for Chapter 10, “Checking Out.” This chapter has the most complicated—and important—stored procedures, so the PHP scripts will need to be reworked more than in the other chapters. All three chapters are from the third part of the book, in which an e-commerce site is developed for the sake of selling physical products (viz., coffee).

I recently StumbledUpon The World of Programming chart (found at Smashing Magazine’s site, which is a really good resource in general). It’s a quick and interesting graphic that introduces some of the key people, technologies, and theories in the world of programming, going back to 1843 (yes!). Smashing Magazine has this thread on the design of the poster, that’s also worth checking out. I, for one, now know where the Ada programming language got its name…

Unlike many things I find online, I actually found the comments to the design post to be more or less worthless. Largely the comments are either: A) What about person or technology X? or B) Look how smart I am. Still, the post itself is worth a quick read.

, I rewrote the examples from Chapter 8, “Creating a Catalog”. Those examples are really simple, running only basic SELECT queries. In this post, I’ll present an alternative version of the stored procedures—and the PHP scripts that call them—for Chapter 9, “Building a Shopping Cart.” Both chapters are from the third part of the book, in which an e-commerce site is developed for the sake of selling physical products (viz., coffee).

Oracle just released the next major version of MySQL, 5.5. The focus in this release is on reliability, scalability, and performance, with benchmarks indicating a performance jump of anywhere from 200 to 1,500 percent (yes, really). MySQL 5.5 also improves performance when running on multi-core systems and adds new replication tools. In terms of features, there’s not much that will affect basic, day-to-day development, although InnoDB is now the default storage engine (previously MyISAM was the default for non-Windows systems).